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Adult and Child 

HOW TO HELP 
HOW NOT TO HINDER 

A STUDY IN 

DEVELOPMENT BY COMRADESHIP 

JAMES L. HUGHES, LL.D. 

Forty Years Inspector of Schools, Toronto 

author of 

Mistakes in Teaching, How to Secure and Retain 
Attention, Froebel's Educational Laws, 
Dickens as an Educator, Rain- 
bows ON War Clouds, etc. 




SYBACUSE, N. Y. 

C. W. BARDEEN, PUBLISHER 






Copyright, 1920. by C. W. Bakdeen 



MAY -8 ia20 ■ 
iCI,A565859 



Publisher's note 

My experience as a teacher, as a father, 
as a grandfather, leads me to believe the 
doctrine of discipline here advocated sound 
and fundamental. Who has not seen a 
child of two busy and happy with his own 
plans, and the same child at ten listless, 
sullen, rebellious, mischievous? A too 
common type of family and of school 
discipline has been epitomized in the moth- 
er's direction to the maid, "Bridget, go 
into the next room and see what Johnny 
is doing and tell him he mustn't." 

The child's activity is not to be repressed 
and deadened, but to be encouraged, stimu- 
lated, shared. "Come, let us live with 
our children," said Froebel. Let the per- 
son who picks up this book read Chapter 
XVIII, and if it does not lead to reading 
the rest of the book entrust the training 
of children to some one else. 



ADULT AND CHILD 



Contents 

I Training the child for power.... 9 

1 1 Developing individuality 17 

III The ideal of unity 29 

IV Kindling the child 39 

V The child's achieving power 50 

V I Physical , intellectual , moral 64 

VII Storing with knowledge 71 

VIII Character, ideals, vision 83 

IX The emotional nature 94 

X Respect for law 105 

XI Conscious responsibility 118 

XII Consciousness of power, not of 

weakness 123 

XIII Control and spontaneity 128 

XIV Courtesy and reverence 132 

XV Freedom and obedience 135 

XVI Coercion weakens 138 

XVII Co-operation stimulates 141 

XVIII Life should be joyous 144 

XIX Achieving vision 147 

XX Habits 152 

XXI Power and character 157 

XXII Good and bad children 163 

XXIII The right of choice 168 

XXIV Spiritual vision 173 

XXV A vital educational creed 180 



ADULT AND CHILD 

Chapter I 

What should adulthood do in developing the 
child's power and character? 

In the old methods of training the child, 
the adult was the direct and active agent; 
the child himself should be the chief agent 
in his own true development. His vital 
character must be based on the develop- 
ment of his own selfhood or individuality, 
and his selfhood can be developed only 
by his own self-activity. Adult inter- 
ference, adult coercion, and adult lack of 
sympathetic reverence for the child as a 
thought of God, and a plan of God, have 
in the past dwarfed the child's true in- 
dividuality. 

Adulthood has done too much of the 
training of the child, and it has trained 
along irreverent and coercive lines, so 



10 Adult and child 

that the development of the image of God 
in the child has been prevented instead of 
promoted. 

Shotdd adulthood cease to train the 
child? No. It should value the vital 
character training of the child, and study 
its fundamental principles more than it 
has ever done. It should first, learn clearly 
the profound truth, that positive training 
produces power, and that negative or 
coercive training essentially weakens power. 
Power in every element of human develop- 
ment, physical, intellectual, and moral, 
increases by use and is weakened by inter- 
ference with its use, or by nfeglect to call 
it into activity. Adulthood should learn, 
too, that vital character growth must be 
from within and not from without. A 
child cannot be "sand-papered into a 
saint". 

Froebel's supreme and all-compf ehending 
ideal of character training is "A conscious 
growth towards the Divine' ' . What should 
adulthood do to aid the child in the achieve- 
ment of this most productive growth? 



Training for power 11 

1 As the child is created in the image 
of the Divine, the supreme ideal of all 
teaching and training should be the de- 
velopment of this image; the selfhood, 
or individuality of each child, as the most 
essential preparation for his own happiness 
and true character growth, and to qualify 
him to do his own special work in promot- 
ing human progress. 

2 It should, by providing appropriate 
life experiences, gradually develop in the 
child a consciousness of the fundamental 
law of unity in Nature, in humanity, and 
in the universe; and between himself and 
these elements of his environment. He 
should especially grow into a consciousness 
of the greatest unity — partnership between 
him and a universal power unseen which 
he will ultimately know as God. This is 
not merely an ideal, beautiful but not 
effective. It is a fundamental and uni- 
versal principle, on which human progress 
largely depends. 

3 It should kindle him by revealing 
to him by operative and other processes, 



12 Adult and child 

a vision of his special power to achieve 
for humanity in some department of pro- 
gress. Kindling and vision training are 
of great importance in securing his own 
fullest development, and in the promotion 
of a progressive civilization. 

4 It should develop his achieving ten- 
dency. He reveals this tendency as soon 
as he can consciously perform any opera- 
tive process. He does not merely try to 
store his ideals, he tries to achieve them. 
The loss of this tendency, or its weakening 
as a dominant element in character, robs 
life of its most productive growth in power; 
and virtue of its highest effectiveness in 
character. 

5 It should guide in the true develop- 
ment of his physical, his intellectual, and 
his spiritual powers in harmony. 

6 It should train him to search earnest- 
ly, intelligently, and persistently for knowl- 
edge, and to use it wisely for culture, and 
in qualifying him for more efficient service. 

7 It should cultivate in him a produc- 
tive love of music, art, and literature, 



Training for power 13 

that he may be inspired by the sublime 
ideals revealed in them, in order to pre-' 
serve in him the character balance neces- 
sary to his happiness, and to qualify him 
for higher visions yet unrevealed, so that 
he may add his most vital revelations to 
enrich the ideals of the race. 

8 It should definitely train his emo- 
tional powers, so that they may become 
permanent, propelling, moral battery 
powers in his life. Knowing right, even 
willing right, does not always lead men to 
make prompt and vigorous efforts to 
achieve right. Froebel was the first great 
educator to understand the importance 
of emotional training, and to introduce 
in a systematic way plans to promote it. 
Well trained emotional power preserves 
through life the tendency that is so strong 
in early childhood; the tendency to 
endeavor p'ropip'tly to achieve the best we 
know and see. This is man's only sure 
way to develop higher pbwer and clearer 
vision. 

9 It should develop his natural respect 
for law in the games he plays into conscious 



14 Adult and child 

respect for the laws of the home, of the 
school, of the state, of society, of his own 
life, and of God. Law should be revealed 
to him as a directive force that multiplies 
his power and his efficiency, and not 
merely as a restraining force which inter- 
feres with the achievement of his plans. 
Law has, in the training of the past, been 
made to the child the bondman of coercion; 
it should be the free guide of his creative 
and achieving powers. The perfect har- 
mony between law and liberty, between 
control and spontaneity, between guidance 
and freedom, should be revealed to him. 
What the Bible calls "The perfect law of 
liberty", should become to him the true 
basis of enlightened and considerate law- 
respecting liberty. This attitude to law 
and to liberty is one of the most essential 
elements in vitally moral citizenship. 

10 It should not rest satisfied with 
revealing to the child his responsibility 
for the evil he does; he should become 
conscious of his supreme responsibility 
for the achievement of the good he has 
power to do. 



Training for power 15 

These revelations and developments 
embrace the essential elements of vital 
character and power. They were all 
considered by Froebel, and definite and 
comprehensive plans were made by him 
for their natural, organic growth in the 
kindergarten, and for their continuous 
growth throughout life. His philosophy 
and the operative processes in good kinder- 
gartens, are worthy of careful study by 
every man and every woman who has the 
responsibility for the character develop- 
ment of even one child. His ideals in 
regard to what adulthood should do in 
developing a child may be summed up as 
follows : 

1 It should develop his selfhood by 
operative processes. 

2 It should relate his selfhood to the 
universe, to humanity, and to God. 

3 It should kindle his selfhood with 
high ethical ideals to qualify him for wider 
and higher vision. 

4 It should make his selfhood intelli- 
gent and progressive, by training all the 



16 Adult and child 

elements of his intellectual power through 
the three stages of receptivity, reflection 
and creative achievement. 

5 It should enrich his selfhood with 
art, music, and literature. 

6 It should energize his selfhood by 
developing his emotional nature into a 
self-acting battery to impel him to the 
achievement of his ideals. 

7 It should preserve his natural re- 
spect for law, and reveal to him by life 
experiences "The perfect law of liberty", 
the harmony between control and freedom. 

8 It should reveal to him clearly and 
attractively his responsibility for achieving 
the good he has power to achieve. 

9 It should develop his powers in har- 
mony; physical, intellectual and spiritual 
powers. 

10 It should make him conscious of 
his power, ,not of his weakness. 

11 It should preserve his natural in- 
terest in knowledge, and train him to 
search for more knowledge, and use it in- 
dependently. 



Chapter II 
Developing the individuality of the child 

Froebel's ideals in regard to individuality 
or selfhood are expressed in the following 
quotations: 

"The spirit of God and of humanity is 
revealed most purely and perfectly by 
man, if he unfolds and represents his own 
being as much as possible in accordance 
with his individuality." 

"It is the special destiny and life work 
of man, as an intelligent and rational 
being, to become fully, vividly and clearly 
conscious of his essence, of the Divine 
efHuence in him." 

"I will protect childhood that it may not, 
as in earlier generations, be pinioned as 
in a straight-jacket, in garments of custom 
arid- a;ncient prescription that have become 
too narrow for the new time, I shall show 
the way, andi, I hop'ej the means that every 
human soul may grow of itself out of its 
own individuality." 

17 



18 Adult and child 

"All progress, all culture is the result 
of the original creativeness of the minds 
of every age which have been able to in- 
crease the sum of existing intellectual and 
material wealth by producing something 
new." 

All modern educational development 
is based on a reverent recognition of the 
value of the individual soul. Froebel in 
his kindergarten system first planned a 
related and progressive series of illuminat- 
ing experiences, and of operative processes 
in performing which each child is a free, 
independent, self -active being; in order 
that he may develop his special department 
of original power, and thus be able to do 
his most effective work in aiding humanity 
in its upward progress. Reverence for the 
individual soul, and the vital importance 
of the conscious unity of each soul with the 
soul of humanity, are two of Christ's most 
vital revelations. 

Froebel was the first to work out, after 
many years of study and thought, a system 
of training all children so that each one may 
become conscious of his own power, and 



Developing individuality 19 

eventually of his responsibility for using 
this special individual power, in doing his 
special work in aiding the race to make 
progress toward the Divine. 

The processes of character training in 
their evolution have passed through three 
stages: coercion, co-operation, and creativ- 
ity. In the coercive stage, adulthood 
recognized two duties — ^to stop the child 
from doing wrong, and to compel him to 
do right — ^right planned for him by adult- 
hood. Mrs. Pipchin achieved a wide 
reputation as a child trainer by forcibly 
carrying out her fundamental principle — 
"To make children do everything that 
they did not like to do, and permit them to 
do nothing that they did like to do." 

Every form of coercion is essentially 
dwarfing in its influence on the develop- 
ment of individual freedom. Comptilsion, 
either in doing or in not doing, robs the 
child of both freedom amd choice, and 
complete growth of individual power is 
not possible without both freedom and 
choice. 



20 Adult and child 

Co-operation, the second step in the 
progressive ideals regarding character 
training, is much higher than coercion. 
It recognizes the right of childhood to a 
kind of partnership with adulthood, but 
it is a one-sided and only partially pro- 
ductive partnership. It gives the child 
the right to co-operate with adulthood in 
carrying out the plans of adulthood. This 
may develop the child's skill, but it does 
not develop his power to plan, or to achieve 
his plans. It does not even consider the 
development of his original or creative 
power. 

The child's individual power increases, 
when he performs operative processes to 
achieve his own plans. Individual power 
and achieving power develop truly only 
when the child makes the plans and tries 
to achieve them. Sometimes the child 
plans beyond his power of achievement. 
When his vision is greater than his skill, 
adulthood has a vital opportunity for 
productive partnership with the child,, by 
coming to his aid in successfully achieving 
his plans. 



Developing individuality 21 

Creativity is infinitely more productive 
than mere co-operation in defining and 
developing the child's individuality. It 
is, of course, important that the child be 
trained so that he may have power to co- 
operate in achieving the plans of other 
people; but in achieving plans he makes 
himself, he has more joy in planning, more 
growth in achieving power, and more com- 
plete development of skill. He there- 
fore develops a higher type of manhood 
in originality, in happiness, and in achiev- 
ing tendency and power. 

Froebel said "Man is a creative being — 
We must launch the child from its birth 
into free and all-sided use of its powers." 
Miss Susan E. Blow, one of Froebel's 
greatest interpreters, said, "Knowledge is 
food', but creation is life." "Creation" 
in its educational sense means original 
planning. 

The motive or planning power of charac- 
ter is even more important than achieving 
power, and it should be trained even more 
definitely. As motive power is higher 
than operative and achieving power, it is 



22 Adult and child 

susceptible to higher training. The ele- 
ment of greatest character value always de- 
velops most rapidly, when the child is creative 
in his work. The child's power of initiating 
original motives to activity, is one of the 
most vital elements of his selfhood or 
individuality. 

Froebel's fundamental process in child 
development and training is self-activity. 
Self-activity means the activity of the 
child in achieving the plans of the child. 
Other educators have seen the value of 
activity in the training of operative power. 
A few have recognized its indirect influence 
on the will or the controlling power. Froe- 
bel was the first to see that training is de- 
fective at its most vital point, if the origi- 
nating element of character is left unde- 
veloped. Formerly men tried to develop 
the power of self-expression through ex- 
pression. Wise men know now that this 
cannot be done. It is equally impossible 
to develop self-activity by activity alone. 
Under the old training only those whose 
selfhood was strong enough to recover 



Developing individuality 23 

from the dwarfing influence of coercion, 
became self-active in life. 
• In the work of the true kindergarten 
the child is not made a conscious imitator. 
Unconscious imitation is natural to the 
child. This fact is the basis of the law that 
demands that the child should have good 
models in the adults with whom he asso- 
ciates at home and at school; good models 
in deportment, in language and in life. 
If, however, he is trained to be a conscious 
imitator, he fails to develop the highest 
element of his character, the basis of his 
powers of vision, of planning and of achieve- 
ment. 

In every department of the work, in a 
good kindergarten, the child is trained 
to be independent, self-reliant, self-reveal- 
ing, self-active and self-achieving. In the 
paper pasting, for instance, when under 
the guidance of his trainer he has folded 
his square of colored paper in definite ways,, 
and used his scissors to cut it as directed,, 
he is then free under the directive law of 
opposites, which has been revealed to him, 
to create out of the resultant square and. 



24 . Adult and child' 

triangles a design of his own. He cannot 
fail, if he follows the law of harmony of 
opposites, to produce a harmonious, bal- 
anced "form of beauty". 

The child may do this on his first day 
in the kindergarten, and, when he does it, 
he has taken one of the most important 
steps in his development. He has taken 
the first step in learning by actual exper- 
ience, not by information imparted by 
some adult, that he has power to be original 
and independent. He had, when he made 
his first cut, five pieces of paper, and in- 
dependently guided by a definite law, he 
has produced a harmonious design. He 
knows that it is his own design. He learns 
soon that with other squares cut as he cut 
his first, he can make other patterns no 
two of which will have the same design. 
This day is surely one of the epoch days 
of his life. 

Freedom and choice are wrought into 
his character, when he is allowed to choose 
the game to be played, the song to be sung, 
the story to be told, as he is allowed to do 
in his turn. In the games requiring part- 



Developing individuality 25 

ners he is trained to choose his own part- 
ner or partners. He, of course, gets his 
turn in being chosen, when tomorrow the 
chosen of today are the choosers. 

It may be objected that the child is not 
sufficiently developed to choose wisely. 
The answer is that the only way to develop 
his power of choice, or any other power, 
is to use the power in regard to problems 
or conditions stiitable for his stage ®f de- 
velopment. The duty of the adult is to 
reveal fundamental principles gradually, 
to guide the child in making future choices 
more wisely. Principles for his guidance 
should always be revealed as enlightenment, 
never as a substitution for his own choice. 
Principles should qualify for wiser choice, 
but they should never destroy or weaken 
the power of choice on the part of the chjld. 
The development of the power of indi- 
vidual choice and independent decision 
rests on the regular exercise of individual 
choice and independent decision. 

It matters comparatively little whether 
the child chooses harmonious colors for 
the mat he is making, or for the picture 



26 Adult and child 

he is to make tomorrow, but it is of vital 
importance in his character training that 
he should become cbnscious of the right to 
choose, and of the duty of choice. Artistic 
principles should be revealed gradually 
to guide him to wiser choice, and to more 
perfect design. This is true of dl\ depart- 
ments of the child's transforming work. 
In this way only can he become conscious 
of his power to transform independently, 
and to transform in ha;rmony with law. 
Law should supplement and direct indi- 
vidual power, but never interfere with its 
development. 

The ideal of absolutism in national life 
naturally led to absolutism in child train- 
ing. As the true ideal of democracy be- 
comes clearer, men see more clearly that 
the freedom of the child under law, is 
one of the basic elements in his training. 
Absolutism requires the subordination of 
the individual to the nation; democracy 
develops a higher national life by pro- 
ducing more completely developed and 
more free individuals. 



Developing individuality 27 

Every agency that robs a child of his 
individuality, and prevents the free out- 
put of his creative self-activity, dwarfs 
or warps the image of God in him. We 
should change the direction of the child's 
out-flowing selfhood when it is flowing 
in wrong directions by guiding him to other 
interest centres, but we should never turn 
it back or stop its current. 

When the child is doing wrong, we should 
secure a change in his centre of interest, 
and keep his achieving and transforming 
powers in operation. Even doing wrong 
develops his individual power. His doing 
is right eyen though his aim or his plan be 
wrong. His doing is an effort to achieve 
his plan. It is the supreme way to de- 
velop his power, his skill and his character. 
It is the only way yet revealed of vitally 
increasing his power of vision, and his 
productive individuality. The worst char- 
acter destroyers are "The child quellers". 

Froebel's ideal was "to train free, think- 
ing, independent men", and in order to 
achieve this great aim he believed "that 
training should rest on life itself, and on 



28 Adult and child 

creative effort". He studied thirty years 
to work out an educational system in which, 
mainly by operative processes, the child 
may be developed in harmony with his 
philosophy, and he called it the kinder- 
garten. 



Chapter III 
Revealing the ideal of unity to the child 

No other words meant as much to Froe- 
bel as "Inner connection". He beHeved 
that all things were created in universal 
harmony, and that growth should be ever 
progressive through inter-dependent and 
inter-influencing elements. 

The law of unity or inner connection, 
he regarded as the philosophical basis of 
man's development socially, nationally 
and religiously. It is the central ideal of 
hope for man's growth to a higher civiliza- 
tion. 

He knew that no great fundamental 
principles can become conscious, vital, and 
productive elements in a man's life, unless 
the apperceptive centres of these principles 
are started to grow in early childhood. 
He founded the kindergarten really to 
start the growth of the centres of every 
department of the child's power. In this 
29 



30 Adult and child 

way only can the roots of the elements of 
highest human development be vitalized 
in the life of a child. Unless the apper- 
ceptive centres of power and of character 
are started to grow in the child's being in 
early life, he has nothing in his experience 
to which in later years the great elements 
of power and character may be vitally re- 
lated. 

Froebel, therefore, by the child's ex- 
periences in the kindergarten planned to 
relate him to God as his Creator and his 
Father ; to growth in the universe in Nature, 
in his environment of flowers, trees, 
streams, lakes, hills, and mountains, and 
living things such as butterflies, birds and 
anitnals; and to humanity in the home, 
in the school, in the church, and in its 
wider unities socially and industrially. 
He did not hope to make the little child 
conscious of unity in its fullest sense, be- 
tween himself and humanity, between 
himself and Nature, between himself and 
God; but he did plan to start to grow in 
the life of each child the centres to which 
all these ideals of unity would naturally 



The ideal of unity 31 

relate themselves in later years, and with- 
out which vital, productive, character 
developing relationships, could never be 
perfectly effected. Indeed, if one had to 
express the philosophy of the kindergarten 
system in a single sentence, the briefest 
and most comprehensive sentence would 
be: the kindergarten aims to develop in 
the life of every child apperceptive centres 
of the most essential elements of power, 
skill, and character, so that th,ey m^y grow 
individually and i'n unity throughout his 
life. 

A tree was Froebel's ideal type of unity, 
in which the centre is related to every 
branch, and twig, and leaf, and root; in 
which the life of the trunk develops the 
life of each part; and in which the fuller 
and richer growth of root, and leiaf, and 
twig, and branch, contributes to the growth 
of the trunk and of every other part. 

In the garden each flower is shown to 
contribute its part in color and form to 
produce the beauty of the whole garden. 
Each one has its own individual beauty, 
and the lack of the individual beauty of 



32 Adult and child 

one would mar the ge'neral effect of the 
whole. So in the woods, the hemlocks and 
the beeches, the pines, and the maples, 
the elms, and the birches have special 
majesty or beauty for each individual 
tree, and the unity of all produces the 
harmonious beauty of the forest. In the 
landscape the lack of hill, or mountain, or 
lake, or river, or green valley, or forest 
background, would impair the general 
beauty of the scenp. Gradually the little 
ones are led to recognize these elemental 
facts, and ultimately they become vital 
life principles, revealing the unity of life, 
and the duty of each life to beautify and 
strengtheai each other life. 

When children are older, community 
work, in which children are grouped for 
united effort to make forms of beauty, 
or to construct forms with blocks or tab- 
lets in the "gift" work, may be planned 
to make children conscious of the need of 
each individual's share in the making of 
the perfect whole, and also to reveal the 
larger and more vital thought that human 
work is complete in the home, in society, 



The ideal of unity 33 

in the nation, or in the race, only when 
each individual does his part truly in har- 
mony with all the rest. 

For instance, in the first cut of the paper 
cutting occupation explained in Chapter 
II, the teacher may place the square on the 
centre of a small table at which four child- 
ren sit, one on each side of the table. Each 
child takes one of the four triangles pro- 
duced by the cut. In turn one of them 
places his triangle near the square at the 
side or at a corner, and the one sitting 
opposite places his triangle on his own side 
directly across the centre of the square, 
and in the same relationship as the first 
triangle to the side or the corner of the 
square. A third then repeats with his 
triangle at the side or corner next to him. 
A pause is then made and the children are 
asked to decide whether the form of beauty 
is complete or not. Having already learn- 
ed by operative experience the law of op- 
posites, and each one having already made 
many "forms of beauty" for the purpose 
of revealing his own independent individ- 
uality to his kindergartner, and of becom- 



34 Adult and child 

ing conscious of it himself, they all recognize 
that the form is incomplete, until the last 
child lays down his triangle in a position 
of harmony with the others. 

To make the lesson more definite each 
child in turn may take his triangle from 
a perfect pattern or "form of beauty" in 
order to show that the omision of one tri- 
angle, or the failure of one child to do his 
part truly to the best of his ability, destroys 
the harmonious perfection of the whole. 
Blocks and tablets may be used in the same 
way, and thus by operative processes in 
which each individual must do his part in 
harmony with his fellows, there are wrought 
into the fibre of the child's life two of the 
fundamental elements of human progress, 
an,d of high, achieving character-^first, 
that to make the fulfilment of his life work 
completely successful, he must become as 
perfect as possible as an individual; and 
second, his developed individuality must 
work in harmony with the individuality 
of his fellow men in order to promote a 
higher civilization. 

Thus the child will come to recognize 



The ideal of unity 35 

in time, and to understand, the essential 
unity that should exist between the in- 
dividual and the race. True individual- 
ism and true community spirit cannot be 
in opposition to each other. By the more 
complete development of individuals, is 
produced a higher community; and this 
higher community in turn produces a 
higher and broader race of individuals, 
who naturally produce a still higher com- 
munity. Thus civilization advances from 
generation to generation. 

By the "Trade songs and games" in the 
kindergarten, the child is related to the 
farmer, the carpenter, the shoe-maker, the 
weaver, the blacksmith, and the other 
workers to whom he is indebted for the 
conditions and supplies necessary for his 
life and comfort. 

By the songs and stories he is led to 
recognize the inter-relationships neces- 
sarily existing between himself and the' 
other members of his family, between him- 
self and his neighbors in the community, 
between himself and those whom he has 
power to help ; and ultimately between his 



36 Adult and child 

life work and national life, and beyond 
that to universal life. 

Thus day by day during the formative, 
symbolic peroid of the child's life, the great 
law of unity, inner-connection, inter- 
relationship, and inter-dependence, is 
wrought into the fibre of his nature so that 
when older he may be able to recognize 
and to fully understand this fundamental 
law, as it relates him to humanity, to the 
universe, and to God. Thus only can 
he learn that duty may be ever productive 
of joy. No formal teaching by parent, or 
teacher, or preacher, can give this law, or 
an,y other great principle vital, revealing, 
and productive power. 

The law of developing life, and the 
process by which development may be 
achieved, must be wrought into life and 
wrought out of life in ordjer to make them 
productive elements in character. 

Froebel based his educational philosophy 
on the law of inner connection, and planned 
the whole of the child's play and work in 
the kindergarten, in order that the prin- 
ciple might naturally unfold itself to each 



The ideal of unity 37 

child through life experiences in all the 
unities described, and also in the unity 
between man's physical, intellectual, and 
spiritual natures; between the receptive, 
reflective, and executive elements of his 
physical power; between childhood, youth, 
and manhood; between knowing, feeling, 
and willing; between control and freedom; 
and between the various subjects of study 
in relation to each other and to human 
development. 

Froebel's deepest philosophical view of 
unity was his conception that the evolution 
of humanity depends on a definite inter- 
relation'ship of development between the 
individual and the race. He taught that 
each individual should in himself represent 
the unified ideals of the race; that the in- 
dividual man cannot be perfect as an in- 
dividual, until be becomes conscious of the 
perfect type of the totality of the race in 
complete unity; and that race perfection 
will not be possible until the individuals 
composing it shall each be race inclusive. 

This doubly inter-related conception of 
community, based on the inter-stimulating 



38 Adult and child 

unity of the individuals composing it, 
and of the inclusive unity of each individual 
as representing in himself the evolution 
of the race, is the highest conception of the 
unity between a man and mankind that 
has ever been conceived. A unity com- 
posed of race revealing men, is a sublime 
ideal. 

When parents and teachers understand 
the law of unity in its comprehensive re- 
lationships, they will be able to aid in its 
unfolding in the lives of their children. 



Chapter IV 

Kindling the child 

To do his best work, his real work in the 
world for God and for civilization, a man 
must be kindled in the centre oE his special 
power. With a perfect system of training 
there should be no "misfits" among men 
and women. The training begun in a 
good kindergarten and continued along 
progressive lines would reduce "misfits" 
to a minimum, if the training were uni- 
versally understood by adults, and prac- 
tised in the schools and homes of the world. 
Men and women would find their true 
spheres, and work would become joy, not 
labor. 

The kindling of a child should not be 
left to chance. Kindling is so important 
that regular, systematic, progressively 
definite methods, and progressively un- 
folding plans for awakening the child to 
a stimulating consciousness of his possi- 
39 



40 Adult and child 

bilities of avhievement in lifting his fellow 
men and in revealing new and higher ideals 
should be begun in the kindergarten and 
continued by operative processes adapted 
to his stage of development throughout 
his training. 

A child performs operative processes, 
when in any way he makes his "Inner 
become outer" by revealing ideals in his 
mind by oral language, by written lan- 
guage, by art, or by transforming material 
things into new conditions of beauty, or 
of utility. He may be operative in reveal- 
ing his own ideals, or in revealing the 
ideals of others. Operative processes di- 
rected by his own mind in the expression 
of his own ideals, are the only truly develop- 
ing processes for self revelation, and for 
self-kindling. 

The earlier the kindling processes are 
used in the child's training, the more effec- 
tive they will ultimately become. Like 
the other departments of human power, 
kindling power should be a natural growth, 
not merely a stimulant. 

The processes already described in Chap- 



Kindling the child 41 

ters two and three for developing the 
special power or selfhood of each child, 
and for relating this selfhood to humanity, 
to the univcit'se, and to God, must be the 
basis of the comprehensive kindling of 
the child. Individuality must not be 
regarded as a single, unrelated element of 
power in the child's character, Individual 
power in its complete development is the 
dominant force which arouses, unifies, 
and directs all the elements of power of 
each individual character. Individuality 
is the determining tendency of personality ; 
it is also the power, or collection of powers, 
in personality. 

The process of kindling the child must, 
therefore, call into action all the elements 
of power in his nature in order to be reason- 
ably complete. For this inclusive awaken- 
ing Froebel has provided very fully in 
the kindergarten. 

Every phase of power has specially ap- 
pealing operative processes to arouse the 
child's interest, and to direct it to imme- 
diate, productively constructive activity. 
Each child has dominant tendencies, and 



42 Adult and child 

different kinds of operative work have 
special attractiveness for different children 
in kindling their creative power. Froe- 
bel studied the range of human interests 
and of human work, and then adopted as 
many varieties of materials as he found 
adapted to the child stage of interest and 
of power for the occupation of the child 
in the kindergarten. He chose materials 
that are inexpensive, that are easily ob- 
tainable, and that may be used by the 
children without injury to themselves, or 
unnecessary inconvenience to others. He 
planned work with each kind of material 
that requires conscious originality and 
not mere imitation, or the carrying out 
of the plans of others. He planned also 
wisely that each child may continue to 
make new and original plans for weeks 
or even for months, with a single kind of 
material. In this way the child reveals 
to his trainer, and gradually to himself, 
his deepest interests and his highest power^ 
and becomes kindled in his creative ten- 
dencies, and in his special individual power. 
The kindergarten system of training is 



Kindling the child 43 

the only system that is founded on crea- 
tivity, and the only system that provides 
carefully chosen materials to develop the 
natural tendency of all children to be 
creative. It is therefore the only system 
that logically, progressively, and persis- 
tently kindles the child by interests that 
never fail to keep him aroused so that he 
earnestly longs to achieve his plans. The 
fact that he is free to make his own plans 
ensures his interest. Children naturally 
tire of working out the plans of others. 
They tire quickly of trying to carry out 
plans made by adults. This is perfectly 
natural. Few adults have either the sym- 
pathy, the genius, or the training to qualify 
them for making plans for the work of 
children. This explains the fundamental 
weakness of ordjinary school education in 
vital character training. 

There is most hope in the future of child- 
ren who tire most quickly of working out 
the plans of adults, and who resent most 
definitely the interference of presumptuous 
adulthood with the plans made by the 
children themselves. Working out their 



44 Adult and child 

own plans, must be more interesting and 
more kindling to children, than working 
out the plans of others, because it calls 
more and higher powers into activity. 
It is more kindling, too, because it is more 
comprehensively developing. To carry 
out a plan made by another, develops con- 
structive skill. To carry out a plan made 
by himself, develops greater constructive 
skill, and in addition develops creative 
power. All children who are trained 
achievingly, respond most joyously, and 
therefore most productively, when their 
highest powers are kindled. 

The only creative method of promoting 
both the general and the special kindling of 
a young child, is to let him plan his own 
work, and try to execute his own plans. 
Adulthood should provide the child with 
materials appropriate to his stage of de- 
velopment; it should unfailingly manifest 
a sympathetic interest in the work he tries 
to do; it should show joyous appreciation 
of his achievement, judging of success from 
the child's standpoint; and it should always 
be ready with smiling face and hopeful 



Kindling the child 45 

tone to render any assistance necessary 
in the early stages of development, when 
his plans are beyond his power of achieve- 
ment; when his insight is greater than his 
power of attainment. 

The important condition is that the 
child's powers of insight and originality 
be kept active. They are capable of 
unlimited development. The fact that 
they do not develop progressively to the 
end of life, is evidence in itself of the failure 
of training and education in the past. 
The continuous and related development 
of these powers, is the only source of pro- 
gressive kindling in the child, the youth, 
and the man; the kindling that grows 
more illuminating, as each new year comes 
with new and greater problems and oppor- 
tunities. 

Problem reco^ition is more developing 
than problem solution. The power to see 
new problems is more joy giving, and more 
productive, than the power to solve prob- 
lems. Most educational systems have 
tried to develop children by training them 
to solve problems, not to discover them. 



46 Adult and child 

Again the lower, the least developing, and 
the least useful powers are developed to the 
neglect of the higher, the most revealing, 
and the most kindling powers. All powers 
of vision and of achievement grow stronger, 
and become more creative, when called into 
productive activity in seeing new plans and 
in trying to achieve them. Children acquire 
a limited mechanical aptitude by trying 
to solve problems supplied by others, but 
such development is not vital. At best it 
produces single candle power from batteries 
that have a natural capacity for ever in- 
creasing illumination intended to reveal 
to each child the special splendors of the 
universe which he has special power to see 
in new and individual forms; intended to 
reveal, too, the possibilities of the re-ad- 
justment and transformation of these forms 
into higher forms of greater productivity. 
In every department of the kindergarten 
work, the kindling of the child's power 
is stimulated. In addition to the general 
processes for developing the natural kind- 
ling of the powers common to all children, 
the kindergarten also provides compre- 



Kindling the child 47 

hensively by processes of the deepest 
interest to children for the kindling and 
developing of special powers or talents. 

Artistic talent is kindled and developed 
by paper cutting and pasting, by mat 
weaving, by embroidery, by sewing forms 
of life and forms of beauty in colored wool, 
by drawing, and by color work with paints. 
Mathematical conceptions are kindled by 
using the "gifts", and they unfold them- 
selves in the mind of the child who has 
special mathematical power, as naturally 
as the bud unfolds into the flower. Con- 
structive children are kindled and develop- 
ed into productively creative beings by 
many occupations, and in this way special 
powers are started in a grander growth 
that will lead to greater achievements in 
technical work, and may guide the race 
to higher revelations of practical value. 

The child's love of nature is used in the 
kindergarten to kindle and develop by the 
revelation of life processes a deeper recog- 
nition of the relationships of life in each 
form to all other life, to the power behind 



48 Adult and child 

life, and to a reverent recognition of the 
value of life; and this surely kindles the 
scientific spirit in all children, which be- 
comes a burning flame in the lives of all 
those specially gifted with the essential 
qualifications and tendencies required by a 
scientist. 

The stories, many of the songs and of 
the plays, kindle the imaginations of all 
children, especially those who have natural 
literary talent, and qualify them for receiv- 
ing illumination from the great revealers 
of literature, W;ho have seen most clearly 
the movement of the Divine Spirit, and 
who have expressed their vision in ex- 
quisite language. 

So by daily life and w/ork in the kinder- 
garten the vital elements in the lives of 
the children are kindled. Each child re- 
ceives the advantages of the general kind- 
ling of the intellectual and spiritual powers 
common to all, and each has the oppor- 
tunity for the special kindling of his highest 
individual power. All are awakened in 
their widest range of interest and of power, 



Kindling the child 49 

and each is distinctively kindled in his 
department of special power. Thus all 
are fitted for greater happiness, for more 
comprehensive growth, for more splendid 
achievement, and for m.ore perfect vision 
of new light, that may enable humanity 
to make more rapid progress toward the 
Divine. 



Chapter V 

The development of the child's achieving 
power 

The saddest experience in connection 
with the development of humanity under 
wrong methods of training, is the loss of 
the child's natural achieving tendency. 
Every normal child reveals a self-active, 
self-propelling, achieving tendency as soon 
as he can creep. He has a vision of some- 
thing to do, and he promptly attempts 
to do it. The love of doing is the strongest 
love of his nature; the joy of doing is his 
deepest joy. 

In his childhood he reveals three domi- 
nant tendencies, to do, to do what he 
plans himself, and to do in co-operation 
with other children. , These three ten- 
dencies are the most essential elements of 
true character. They are the elements 
that enable humanity to make progress 
toward a higher civilization. 
50 



The achieving power 51 

The weakening of these tendencies in 
human lives, is the result of negative train- 
ing. All good elements in character are 
positive, and true training should be di- 
rected to the development of the positive 
elements. Yet in the past this simple and 
manifest proposition has not been prac- 
tised by most of those responsible for the 
training of children. The good elements, 
the positive elements, should be more 
dominant in adulthood than in childhood. 
It is an unfailing law that can not be too 
often stated, that the better elements in 
human nature under proper training, 
develop most rapidly. It is also profound- 
ly true that the higher elements in our 
moral natures turn to evil instead of good, 
and degrade us instead of uplifting us, 
when their development is interfered with 
by coercive or negative training. Power 
does not die as the result of bad training. 
It becomes evil, when it is meant by the 
Creator to be good. No boy is bad, till 
he is made bad by bad training, and the 
dwarfing of his best powers leads to his 
swiftest and deepest degradation. 



52 Adult and child 

The training of the past has been almost 
universally devoted to the negative ele- 
ments of power and character. This is a 
fundamental error. The stopping of wrong 
doing has been supposed to develop right 
elements of character. This error is main- 
ly responsible for weakening the achieving 
tendency of the race, and thus robbing 
men and women of real power and truly 
effective character. 

Solomon said "Train up a child in the 
way he should GO." Adulthood has at- 
tempted to train him in the way he should 
"Don't go." The words still used in child 
training are mainly negative, not positive. 
Children are told to "don't" instead of to 
"do", to "stop" instead of to "go on", 
to "quit" instead of to "persevere", to be 
"quiet" instead of to be "achieving". 
"Don't", "stop", "quit", "be quiet", are 
all power destroying commands. 

It would be infinitely more productive 
of character power in the child to do wrong 
continually than to become a "don'ter", 
a "stopper", or a "quitter". His wrong 



The achieving power 53 

doing at any rate develops his habit of 
doing, his power to do, and his creatively 
constructive and achieving tendencies. 
It preserves in his life the elemental pro- 
ductive and transforming tendencies of 
his nature, so that, when in mature life 
he gets a good ideal, or is stirred by a high 
emotion, he has the tendency, the habit, 
and the power to try to achieve his ideal. 
Without these there can be no vital, posi- 
tive character. The millions of men and 
women who fail even to try to do what they 
know they ought to do, are sufficient to prove 
the character perverting influence of the 
coercive, negative training of the past. 

The child should never lose his achieving 
tendency. The way to force him to lose 
it, is to stop his achieving. The way to 
develop it and make it the dominant ten- 
dency in his life, is to keep him doing what 
he plans himself, and thus develop his 
achieving tendency into the habit of 
achieving. The only way to make effort 
to achieve a habit, is to guide the child 
in the achievement of his own plans. Ori- 
ginality of motives, and energetic efforts 



54 Adult and child 

to achieve them, are the real causes of 
habits. The child may be original and 
energetic in wrong doing, as well as in 
doing right. It is not at all necessary, 
however, that the child should develop 
his achieving tendency by doing wrong. 
The world around him is full of interesting 
opportunities to do good, so that he should 
like to do, if wisely trained, positively not 
negatively. If he is doing wrong instead 
of right, he is not to blame. His trainers 
are to blame. If he is doing wrong it is 
because at the moment wrong is the most 
interesting thing to him. Whether he is- 
trying to do a right thing or a wrong thing, 
the thing he is trying to do, is the most 
interesting thing to him. If anything 
else were more interesting to him at the 
time, it is clear that he would be trying 
do it. All that his trainers need to do, 
is to secure the transfer of his interest from 
the wrong he is doing to some right thing 
in his environment which is adapted to his 
stage of development. 

If the right brought to his attention as a 



The achieving power 55 

substitute for the wrong he has been doing, 
is appropriate to his present interests, and 
to his present powers of achievement, 
he will plan the good and work to achieve 
it with as much energy as he showed in 
planning and achieving the wrong. To 
doubt this means that the influence of 
Divine power is evil instead of good in the 
child's life. 

The child loves to be constructive better 
than to be destructive, and to be produc- 
tive better than to be wasteful. He is 
destructive and wasteful so often, because 
he has not been provided with suitable 
materials, and stimulated by sympathetic 
appreciation of his efforts to be construc- 
tive and productive. 

Every child undwarfed by negative 
methods of training, undiscouraged by 
lack of appreciation, and undeterred by 
adult criticism, longs to render loving ser- 
vice in the home. The desire to give lov- 
ing service, is usually driven out of the 
child's life by negative training, by lack of 
appreciation, and by adult criticism, or 



56 Adult and child 

impatient reproof. It should develop 
more rapidly than any other element in 
character, because it was intended to be 
the highest element in character; and the 
higher the power the more rapid and the 
more unlimited are the possibilities of its 
development. 

Loving service and achieving power are 
definitely inter-related. The one is the 
complement of the other. Without 
achieving power loving service is but a 
beautiful ideal, which gradually becomes 
less stimulating, less productive of action, 
and ultimately loses its kindling power. 
Without the ideal of loving service, achiev- 
ing power becomes an agency of selfish- 
ness, and loses its dynamic energy in im- 
pelling humanity to a higher degree of 
civilization. Developed together, as they 
should be, each contributes to the growth 
of the other so that the ideal of loving ser- 
vice becomes more dominant, and achiev- 
ing power becomes more efficient. Thus 
both become effective agencies in promot- 
ing human happiness and character, and in 
contributing to human progress. 



The achieving power 57 

Self-control has meant, and to a large 
extent still means, power to keep away from 
evil. The true ideal of self-control is, 
power to direct our energies, — physical, 
intellectual, and moral, in the achievement 
of good. Responsibility, too, has been 
treated negatively. We have taught 
children their responsibility for the evil 
.they do, and have failed to reveal to them 
theit vital responsibility for achieving the 
good they have power to do. We have 
dealt with self-consciousness negatively 
as a weakness instead of positively, as a 
central element in vital power. There is 
a consciousness of self-weakness resulting 
from a failure to develop a consciousness 
of self -power; power to see new ideals and 
power to achieve them. Both the power 
of vision and the power of achievement 
develop progressively by achieving as far 
as possible our visions of today. A true 
consciousness of individual power, makes 
it possible to have true consciousness of 
responsibility, and these are the vital forces 
that impel men to duty. 



58 Adult and child 

Goodness has been regarded as the 
absence of badness. This is an incorrect 
and misleading view. The fact that there 
are no weeds in a field does not produce 
a harvest of good grain. The truth is that 
badness is lack of goodness. Goodness is 
positive, badness is negative. The true 
purpose in training should not be the weak 
ideal of restraining badness, but the vital 
ideal of making goodness achievingly, and 
transformingly productive. 

There are some who yet believe that 
children do not like to work. There are 
unfortunately some such children, but 
they are man made, not God made. They 
are the products of negative training; of 
coercion, not of creativity. 

"Children will play all day without 
getting tired, but set them to work and 
they will be tired in an hour," say unbe- 
lievers in childhood. If we treated their 
play as we treat their work, they would 
soon tire of play too. Make the boy 
play baseball for an hour before breakfsat,. 
send him out again to play baseball until 
noon, and drive him to the baseball field 



The achieving power 59 

to play all afternoon, and he will soon hate 
to play as much as badly trained boys 
hate to work. Both play and work be- 
come distasteful through the improper 
intermeddling of adults. Both play and 
work are effective agencies in the character 
development of the child, when adulthood 
is the reverent partner of the child in the 
achievement of the child's own plans. 

Boys who are supplied with essential 
tools and with materials adapted to their 
stage of development, do not tire of work- 
ing, if they are allowed to make their own 
plans. "Oh, yes," say the unbelievers, 
"they may work if you let them do as they 
like." That is what they should do, what 
they must do to develop power to plan and 
power to achieve. 

There is little development of the highest 
and most effective kind for the child in 
achieving the plans of adulthood. He 
naturally gets tired of working out the 
plans of others, because such work calls 
into activity the less important elements 
of his power and character. Interest to- 
be productive of satisfactory results in 



60 Adult and child 

developing higher power of interest, high- 
er powers of achievement, or higher powers 
of character, must appeal to the whole 
child. In responding to the request or 
command of an adult, a very small part 
of the child's real nature, is called into 
activity, and that part is not his selfhood. 

When unbelievers in childhood and in 
the new revelations regarding the training 
of children through their own self-activity, 
have been convinced that children really 
do love to work, when they make their 
own plans, they still raise a final objection. 
"Yes," they admit, "they will work on 
without losing interest, but they will not 
stick to one kind of work." 

The answer to this objection is clear to 
those who study the true growth of child- 
hood. The young child should not con- 
tinue long at one kind of work. He is in 
a world new to him. One of the most 
important things for him to do, is to learn 
his relationships to his environment, and 
his power to transform conditions in it in 
harmony with his own ideals. If he works 
at ten different kinds of work in a day, 



The achieving power 61 

he has grown probably ten times more, 
than if he worked all day at the same kind 
of work. He has become conscious of his 
power to transform conditions in ten ways, 
instead of in one way. Working ceases to 
be productive, when the child has lost 
interest in it. Variety in original planning, 
and in new aims and efforts to achieve, 
is the surest interest sustainer. Hence 
the child enjoys doing many things in a 
day. 

If persisting in doing one kind of work 
would develop a child more than doing ten 
kinds of work, the Creator would have 
made a child with an unchanging interest. 
He did -not do so, and so the normal child 
does not "stick to one kind of work". In 
doing many kinds of work each day he is 
becoming acquainted with his material 
environment, with the fact that it is trans- 
formable, with the still more revealing 
fact that he has original power to see new 
ways in which to transform it, and with 
the great practical revelation, that he has 
power to transform it in harmony with his 
own plans. In other words, he starts to 



62 Adult and child 

grow in his life the vital apperceiving cen- 
tres of vision, and of the realization of 
vision by his achieving power. 

The child who has become conscious 
of his power to transform the material 
conditions of his environment by opera- 
tive processes that are really his own from 
conception to achievement, will in mature 
life have visions of the need of reforming 
the intellectual and moral conditions of 
his environment, and more important 
still, he will have the habit of reforming 
conditions that need improvement. 

In every department of the work in the 
kindergarten; in the varied occupations, 
pasting, mat-weaving, sewing, etc., in stick 
laying, tablet work, peas work, etc., and in 
using the "gifts", the child day after day 
makes original plans which he successfully 
achieves. Many other advantages result 
from his work, such as development of 
interest power; revelation of definite mathe- 
matical conceptions; and of their relation- 
ships to each other and to the universe; 
art ideals, constructive ideals, and ideals 
of joy in work; but the greatest advantages 



The achieving power 63 

are those connected with the development 
of the natural achieving tendency of every 
normal child. 

The true development of this tendency 
will make it the dominant element in the 
life of each individual. It will give life 
real value. It will make the ideal of lov- 
ing service vital. It will reveal creative 
work as the most productive source of 
happiness. 

It will be worth while to reveal higher 
visions of truth to men, when their training 
has given them the habit of trying earnest- 
ly and persistently to achieve their visions. 



Chapter VI 

The harmonious development of the child's 

powers, physically, intellectually, 

and morally 

Froebel's law of universal unity revealed 
to him the comprehensive and illuminat- 
ing truth that no department of any organic 
unity can reach its full development unless 
every other department of the unity has 
also been fully developed. It made it clear 
also, that complete development of an 
organic unity cannot be attained by inde- 
pendent development of the separate units 
of which the unity is composed. The high- 
est development of all the elements of an 
organic unity, results from the development 
of all the subordinate elements of power 
through the highest element in the unity. 

Physical training that is intended to 
develop the body only, does not produce 
a perfect body. Even if a man could de- 
velop a perfect physique without a corre- 
sponding mental and spiritual develop- 
ment, he would be a very imperfect type of 
64 



Physical, intellectual, moral 65 

man. The same statement applies to the 
development of the intellectual nature 
alone, or of the spiritual nature alone. 
Unified, balanced, harmonious manhood 
is the true aim, and Froebel lays the foun- 
dation for such development in the kin- 
dergarten. 

The games, the plays, and the occupa- 
tions of the kindergarten develop and 
correlate the three departments of the 
child's power. Play is the most completely 
developing process of the child's physical, 
intellectual and moral powers. It is the 
natural work of the child, and Froebel 
saw in the naturalness and the universilarity 
of free play in childhood a clear indication 
of its necessity, as a means of beginning 
informally the child's unified development. 

In writing of Pestalozzi's school in Yver- 
dun in which he was a teacher, Froebel 
says, "I studied the boys' play, the whole 
series of games in the open air, and learned 
to recognize their mighty power to awake 
and to strengthen the intelligence and the 
soul, as well as the body. In these games 
and what was connected with them I de- 



66 Adult and child 

tected the mainspring of the moral strength 
which animated the pupils and young 
people of the institution. The games, 
I am now fervently assured, formed a 
mental bath of extraordinary strengthen- 
ing power." 

"Play," he says, "is the highest phase of 
child development — of human development 
at this period; for it is self -active represen- 
tation of the inner, from inner necessity 
and impulse." 

"The plays of childhood are the ger- 
minal leaves of all later life." 

"It is the sense of sure and reliable power, 
the sense of its increase both as an indi- 
vidual and as a member of the group, that 
fills the boy with all pervading, jubilant 
joy during the games. It is by no means 
the physical power alone that is fed and 
strengthened in these games; intellectual 
and moral power, too, is definitely and 
steadily gained and brought under control." 

Over stimulation of the intellect at the 
expense of the body, is now universally 
recognized as an evil, which always weak- 
ens physical power, and thus tends to 



Physical, intellectual, moral 67 

destroy the harmony that should exist be- 
tween the physical and the intellectua] pow- 
der of each individual. It sometimes results 
in the untimely death of the student. 

The evil effects of the failure to observe 
the law of unity in the development of 
physical, intellectual, and spiritual power 
in childhood, would reveal themselves more 
clearly, if 'the children had not many op- 
portunities for natural unified development 
in their free play out of doors. These 
■evil effects are much more clearly seen in 
the cities, where, until recently, children 
have not had satisfactory opportunities 
for free play. 

The kindergarten is much more essen- 
tial in cities and towns than in rural dis- 
tricts to provide opportunities for opera- 
tive work, for creative work, for relating 
the child to Nature through its growth 
processes and for unified development of 
the child's power, physically, intellectually, 
and spiritually. 

Children who are brought up in the coun- 
try usually have several advantages over 
those who are brought up in the cities, 



68 Adult and child 

or in the towns. They have much better 
opportunities for free play out of doors; 
they are allowed much greater freedom 
in making gardens of their own, and of thus 
becoming vitally acquainted with Nature 
through her growth processes; they have 
unlimited opportunities to plan new things, 
and to try to achieve them; and they have 
more opportunities for rendering loving 
service in the performance of daily duties 
by sharing the responsibilities of the family 
in various departments of the work of the 
home, the garden, and the farm — especial- 
ly in the care of poultry and live stock. 
Froebel provided the same types of three- 
fold culture in the kindergarten by his 
system of plays and games; by real gar- 
dening, where possible, and by planting 
seeds in boxes, where no ground can be se- 
cured for gardens; by operative processes 
requiring creative planning, and transform- 
ing manual work; and by kindling the 
desire to perform loving service by wisely 
chosen stories, and by training the children 
to make gifts for mother, father, baby, 
grandma, grandpa, and other relatives or 



Physical, intellectual, moral 69 

friends. Every article made by a child 
in the kindergarten is designed as a gift 
for some loved one, or some needy one. 
The joy of the child in the kindergarten 
at Christmas time, results from giving 
presents, not receiving them. The kin- 
dergarten Christmas tree is covered with 
gifts made by the children themselves for 
their parents, or their brothers, and sisters. 
They are thus trained to become producers 
of happiness, to render loving service to 
others, and to recognize their responsibility 
for the good they have power to achieve. 

Those who have seen the little ones 
presenting their gifts to their parents or 
to other members of their family — gifts 
made by themselves — know that to child- 
hood at least it is more blessed to give than 
to receive. The blessed Christmas time 
is too often made a time when the milk of 
youthful generosity is soured so that it 
becomes adult selfishness. 

The quotations in this chapter from the 
writings of Froebel prove that he planned 
consciously to develop body, mind, and 
spirit in unity by the same processes and 



70 Adult and child 

at the same time in the plays, games, and 
occupations of the kindergarten. Expe- 
rience has shown that, even to adults,, 
strength of body, strength of mind, and 
true spiritual growth, come with most, 
productive power, when they are developed 
at the same time, and by the same opera- 
tive processes. The essential element in 
securing development, is the vital interest 
taken in the operative processes. 

The growth in each of the three depart- 
ments of power that result from any effort,, 
depends more on the interest that stimu- 
lates effort than on the amount of physical 
energy put forth. Creativity in this, as 
in all other departments of productive 
activity, is more developing than co-opera- 
tion in achieving the plans of others, be- 
cause it arouses vital interest. 

One of the many reasons why play is 
so comprehensively developing to the 
child's whole being, is that when playing; 
he is an original, independent individual 
seeing new conditions, making new plans 
to meet the new conditions, and immediate- 
ly trying to execute his plans. 



Chapter VII 

Storing the child's mind with knowledge 

For many years the communication of 
knowledge was the supreme aim of edu- 
cation. Until recently educational sys- 
tems were based on the half truth 
"Knowledge is power". No educational 
system based on this ideal can train a, 
rapidly developing and progressive race. 
Knowledge does not become power till 
it becomes a vital part of the selfiiood. 
Storing knowledge in the memory does not. 
make it vital. Knowledge becomes vital 
power only when it is organized as a part 
of the child's enriched individuality. The- 
child is infinitely greater than knowledge, 
and all educational systems must ulti- 
mately be based on a reverent recognition 
of the value of the child and of the possi- 
bilities of his growth. When this is done, 
the child's power, skill, and character 
will be developed much more rapidly than. 
71 



72 Adult and child 

in the past, and knowledge will have more 
vital power than it could have otherwise. 
Five men — Locke, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, 
Herbart and Froebel brought child devel- 
opment into prominence. They may be 
divided into two classes. Locke and Her- 
bart believed they could mould the char- 
acter of a child as they wished, in accor- 
dance with the nature of the knowledge 
they communicated to him. Rousseau, 
Pestalozzi and Froebel taught that 
character development is a growth, not 
a process of moulding, and that knowledge 
really becomes a vitally productive or 
transforming power only when it is used 
in the achievement of definite creative 
purposes. Knowledge indeed never be- 
comes clear until it has been wrought in, 
assimilated, and wrought out in the 
achievement of original plans. The 
achievement of original plans defines 
knowledge and permanently fixes it as an 
element of power in the life of the child. 
Knowledge should become an element — 
a vital element — in the creative life 
of each child, but this result cannot be 



Storing with knowledge 73 

attained so long as educational systems 
are based mainly on the considerations of 
systems and methods of communicating 
knowledge. This desirable result will be 
achieved when the supreme study of edu- 
cational leaders is directed to the develop- 
ment of the child, and not to the knowledge 
that should be communicated to him. 

Taking Herbart and Froebel as repre- 
senting two clearly defined modern ideals 
of training, we may see more perfectly 
the difference between the two ideals, 
one of which makes knowledge the trans- 
forming agency, and the other makes the 
child the transforming agency. 

Both Herbart and Froebel studied the 
child in order to plan an educational sys- 
tem that would develop a higher type of 
character, and enable each individual to 
work out his highest destiny. Both made 
the development of moral character the 
supreme aim of education. But their 
fundamental ideals were radically dif- 
derent. 

Herbart studied the child to find the best 
that could be done for him by adulthood. 



74 Adult and child 

Froebel studied the child to . discover 
his own natural powers and growth pro- 
cesses, so that he might be able to help 
him in working out his own development. 

Herbart magnified and dignified the 
work of the teacher and the parent. 

Froebel, while recognizing fully the 
importance of the teacher and the parent, 
reverenced the child's selfhood, and reveal- 
ed the vital importance of the child him- 
self, as the chief agent in his development. 

Herbart limited the original capacity 
of the soul of the child to one power — that 
of "entering into relations with the ex- 
ternal world". He believed that the 
teacher could make the child's soul accord- 
ing to his plan, and that the character 
of the soul may be decided by the kinds 
of knowledge used in its making. 

Froebel believed that the soul of the 
child transformed knowledge, not that 
knowledge formed and transformed the 
soul. He regarded the soul as an element 
of divinity that must develop in power, 
and that reaches its best development 
by its own creative self-activity. 



Storing with knowledge 75 

Herbart made the will the result of 
action. 

Froebel made action the result of will. 

Herbart aimed to develop in his pupils 
the power of co-operative and productive 
activity. 

Froebel's ideal was co-operative, pro- 
ductive, creative self -activity. 

Herbart made instruction the basis of 
morality. 

Froebel made moral development depend 
on loving service, the growth of true emo- 
tions, and the culture of the achieving 
tendency. He made the basis of morality 
true living; not information, or instruction, 

Herbart stored the mind with knowledge. 

Froebel trained the child to use knowl- 
edge as he gained it in achieving original 
plans. He awakened new ideals in the 
.child's mind, and developed his emotional 
battery power to propel him to achieve- 
ment of his new ideals. 

The child is greater than knowledge. 
Every progressive step in modern educa- 
tion is based on the increasing reverence 



76 Adult and child 

of humanity for the individuality or self- 
hood of the child. 

Notwithstanding this fact, knowledge 
is of great importance in the child's educa- 
tion, and in his future life and progress. 
So long as knowledge is treated as the 
secondary aim in education and the devel- 
opment of power, skill, and character as 
the primary aim, there is little danger. 
So long as knowledge is made the primary 
aim, educational systems cannot achieve 
the best results either in communicating 
knowledge, or in developing power, skill, 
and character. 

Thoughtful minds have long noted that 
a child has acquired a wide range of knowl- 
edge limited only by the extent of his 
experiences, when he is two years old. 
He has learned to speak a new language, 
and to speak it well or incorrectly according 
to the way it is spoken at home. He 
learns correct pronunciation as easily as 
incorrect. He learns to speak grammati- 
cally quite as easily as ungrammatically. 
He knows the name and the use of every 
article in the home that he has ever heard 



Storing with knowledge 77 

named, as it was used. He has intimate 
and reliable knowledge about many things 
in his environment. 

He never learns after he goes to school, 
as rapidly as he did before he went to school. 
Froebel knew that this should not be so. 
He believed that children would continue 
to acquire knowledge and relate it to other 
knowledge as rapidly and as definitely in 
school, as before they went to school, if 
school conditions and methods were adapt- 
ed to the child's nature and to the laws 
of his growth. 

Froebel knew that no rational mother 
ever taught her little child the names and 
uses of spoons, knives, forks, cups, chairs, 
or other articles. Outside of school no one 
was ever unwise enough to do such teach- 
ing. The knowledge gained by the child 
before he went to school was the incidental 
result of his activities and his experiences, 
not the result of direct teaching. 

Froebel's kindergarten system and work 
beyond the kindergarten was planned to 
continue during the life of the young child, 
the growth and knowledge-gaining pro- 



78 Adult and child 

cesses that were so vitally developing 
before he went to school. He preserved 
and developed the child's vital interest in 
life by his experiences in the kindergarten; 
he provided for growth in power and in- 
crease in knowledge by the child's self- 
activity; and he made the child conscious 
of the value of knowledge, of fact, and of 
law by training him to use both old and 
new knowledge in planning, and to use 
both old and new laws in achieving his 
new plans. 

In this way he continued in the kinder- 
garten in accordance with clearly defined 
and logically related, progressive plans, 
to reveal new knowledge and new laws, 
and to make the knowledge and the laws 
real elements in the child's life, and not 
merely facts and principles stored in his 
memory. He retained the same vital 
laws of child growth that revealed and 
fixed knowledge and law in the child's 
life in the early stages of his development 
in knowledge and power; throtigh essential, 
evolutionary self-activity in learning the 
most important knowledge and laws by 



Storing with knowledge 79 

applying them, as he had done in his free 
life before he went to the kindergarten. 
He did not leave the child's progressive 
development to chance. Neither did he 
rob the child of freedom or of self-activity. 
He guided him m the free use of choice 
and real self -activity under law to develop 
in his consciousness the most essential 
laws of life, and relate them to his powers 
and to the knowledge necessary in applying 
them, and thus make them vital, organic 
elements in his character. 

Even if the sole aim of the teacher were 
to communicate knowledge, the surest 
way to reveal it, and the most certain way 
to help the child to retain it, is to train 
him to dig for it himself, and to use it, 
when he gets it. Every new lesson should 
consist of two parts, the revelation of new 
truths and new principles, and their ap- 
plication when understood. Revelation 
is important; application is still more im- 
portant. 

The introduction of the kindergarten 
has revolutionized the methods of teaching 
frotti the primary classes to the universities. 



80 Adult and child 

The science teacher or lecturer, until fifty 
years ago, was satisfied with stating facts 
and explaining principles. Occasionally 
he illustrated them with diagrams on the 
blackboard. Often there were no black- 
boards on which to make the illustrations. 
The students were expected to write the 
facts or laws in their note books, or to 
memorize them from text books in order 
to be able to pass the examinations. In 
after years both facts and laws were gen- 
erally forgotten. 

It was quite natural that most students 
should forget them, because there was no 
vital reason for remembering them, except 
in the case of teachers who were to blight 
other minds by the same unnatural meth- 
ods. A much higher stage was reached when 
the teacher or professor performed experi- 
ments and the pupils recorded the results in 
note books. This however, showed but a 
partial comprehension of the laws of growth 
that Froebel used in the kindergarten. 
Finally in all schools and universities that 
make any claim to use modem methods, 
laboratories are fitted up in order that 



Storing with knowledge 81 

every pupil or student may perform for 
himself the experiments by which known 
facts and laws may be tested, and by which 
still unknown facts and laws may be re- 
vealed. 

Dr. William T. Harris, the greatest edu- 
cational philosopher of his time, said that 
"Mathematics — especially geometry — un- 
folded naturally in the minds of children 
trained in a good kindergarten by the use 
of the gifts". In similar ways the methods 
of teaching all subjects have been improved 
so that the child in school continues to be 
self-active, and is trained to be self-direc- 
tive. He is trained to dig for the gold in 
books instead of to memorize their contents. 
He is trained to use knowledge creatively 
instead of reproductively. 

As a result of knowledge-cramming 
for examinations which destroyed the 
natural taste for reading, a very small 
percentage of men and women read on 
through life the books that are the store- 
houses of the illuminating experiences 
and revelations of the past; that contain 



82 Adult and child 

the wisdom and the vision of the world's 
leaders. 

The methods of the kindergarten, when 
they are understood and practised in the 
schools and homes of the world, will give 
the men and women of the future more 
vital reverence for knowledge, clearer 
remembrance of the knowledge they have 
acquired, more ready response of memory 
with knowledge required unexpectedly for 
immediate use in emergencies, and more 
power to use the knowledge they have 
in gaining more knowledge. They will 
also create a hunger interest for more 
knowledge to guide them in their pro- 
gressively higher work for themselves and 
for their fellowmen. 



Chapter VIII 

How to develop balanced character, to kindle 

higher ideals, and to guide to 

higher vision 

In true growth it is necessary not only to 
preserve the essential balance between the 
physical, intellectual, and spiritual powers, 
but to preserve also proper balance in the 
elements of these departments of human 
power. Physical exercise may be given to 
develop the organs of the body, to give 
erectness of pose, to strengthen the muscles, 
to promote grace and dignity in action, to 
keep the nervous system in proper tone, or 
to train the whole body to respond quickly 
and definitely to the mind. Perfect training 
physically will neither neglect nor overdo 
the training of any department of physical 
power, or skill, or grace, or dignity, or ef- 
ficiency. 

Physical health means harmonious phys- 
ical development in every department of 
the physical being. It is equally true that 
83 



84 Adult and child 

intellectually and morally each intellectual 
and moral element must reach its best de- 
velopment in order to attain the highest, 
the most complete, and the most self-active 
intellectual and moral efficiency. Man's 
powers in their development illustrate per- 
fectly Froebels' fundamental law of or- 
ganic unity; the more perfect the develop- 
ment of each individual power, physical, 
intellectual, and spiritual, the more perfect, 
the development of the whole being; and 
the more complete the development of the 
being as an organic unity, the greater be- 
come the possibilities of the development 
of each individual power. 

A crank is a person whose powers are 
not properly related and balanced. Lack of 
balance may result from over development 
of some department of power, or from neg- 
lect to develop other departments of pow- 
er. Education should promote harmony 
between the elements of a child's power. 
Until recently education tended to produce 
greater lack of harmony by devoting atten- ■ 
tion almost exclusively to the intellect and 
neglecting the other departments of power. 



Character, ideals, vision 85 

Even the intellectual development of 
schools and universities has been directed 
mainly to the lower intellectual powers, 
the powers of receptivity, of memory, and 
of reflection. Modern education based on 
Froebel's ideals does not undervalue any 
intellectual power, but it teaches that the 
subordinate intellectual powers can reach 
their highest development, only when 
they are developed in relation to, and 
in harmony with the higher intellectual 
powers of achievement, of imagination, 
and of vision. It plans to develop the 
highest elements of intellectual and moral 
efficiency, to make more thoroughly bal- 
anced men and women, to add to their joy 
giving power, to give culture to their es- 
thetic power, to increase their achieving 
power, and to qualify them for higher and 
clearer vision. 

Utilitarian ideals have restricted educa- 
tional effort. Modern education however 
recognizes the vital importance of a more 
comprehensive training in the art of making 
a living by the development of the creative, 
the constructive, and the productive pow- 



86 Adult and child 

ers. The development of these powers 
promotes the development of all the powers- 
of each child, especially of his special indi- 
vidual power. It is right that the child 
should be trained to value wealth truly. 
He should know that it may be an agency 
for good. He should learn also that wealth 
may bring evil instead of good; sorrow in- 
stead of joy. Unless the child's higher 
intellectual powers and moral powers are 
developed, material conditions are almost 
certain to engross his attention through- 
out his life, to prevent the recognition of 
real glories available for him, and to rob- 
him of the joy of helpful, hopeful, sympa- 
thetic co-operation with his fellowmen.. 
The wealthiest men are those who see di- 
amonds in the dew drops, and gold in the 
after-glow. The men and women wha 
most clearly understand the value of ma- 
terial things are those whose higher intellec- 
tual and spiritual powers have been devel- 
oped most perfectly. 

The higher the intellectual power, the 
more useful are its life values, and the. 
greater the possibilities of its growth. The 



Character, ideals, visioft 87 

greater also are its advantages in develop- 
ing and harmonizing all subordinate powers. 
The development of the imagination, for 
instance, is much more essential to the com- 
prehension of mathematics, than the study 
of mathematics is to the development of 
the imagination. 

Art should be taught in all schools and 
to all children to qualify them for a better- 
understanding of the great ideals revealed 
in the past in painting, sculpture, and ar- 
chitecture; to give power to conceive new 
and higher ideals of beauty; to improve- 
and elevate the taste in home making and 
decoration; and to qualify for greater suc- 
cess in most of the departments of indus- 
trial life. 

Music should be taught to kindle ele- 
ments of power, and joy, and spiritual- 
growth; to qualify for receiving inspiration, 
and uplift from a more perfect appreciation, 
of the revelations of the great composers; 
and to enrich individual and family life by- 
interpretation of good music. A know-- 
ledge of music may have many practical- 
advantages, too. 



88 Adult and child 

Most of the teaching of literature in the 
past was largely devoted to the study of 
the meaning of the words used, and to 
analysis of the sentences in the study of the 
selections chosen. The result of such 
teaching was that a very small percentage 
of adults continued to read good literature 
with a view of getting from it a wider out- 
look on life, higher ideals of the growth of 
humanity towards the Divine, clearer vis- 
ions of duty, and more sublime revelations 
regarding the universe and man's relation- 
ships to it. The wisdom of the sages and 
the glorious visions of the poetic spirits 
who had come most perfectly into harmony 
with the Divine Spirit through the progres- 
sive centuries, were made mainly "A study 
of words and grammar". The vision was 
lost in the study of the form in which it 
was expressed. 

Froebel revealed the better way of using 
art, music, and literature, as a means of 
developing and kindling the supreme ele- 
ments of human power and character. 

The most vital revelations of the evolu- 
tion of humanity are not contained in his- 



Character, ideals, vision 89 

tory. They are the revelations in great 
art, in great music, and in great literature. 
In these we find the records of the prophet 
souls who found the crests of the hills of 
progress, who have climbed to the summits 
of higher hills, and who have been the her- 
alds in humanity's epoch movements to- 
ward a higher civilization. 

As educational leaders have learned the 
philosophy on which Froebel based his 
work in the kindergarten, the teaching of 
art, music, and literature has become more 
vital. Art is now recognized as a means 
of revealing originality and of making 
greater men and women with power to 
produce higher conditions of life, not 
merely of making great pictures. Music is 
taught, not as an accomplishment, but as 
a life-transforming agency. Literature is 
regarded as the great storehouse in which 
have been recorded the progressively more 
splendid visions of humanity consciously 
growing towards the Divine. Good teach- 
ers no longer make the literature les- 
son a formal statement of the best avail- 
able interpretations of the meaning of the 



90 Adult and child 

author, but a training of the student so that 
each one may interpret for himself. 

To tell a child or a man what some one 
else has learned from a great poem is not 
a vitally educative process. Each child 
should be trained to be his own interpreter. 
Each should decide independently which is 
the greatest thought in the poem, or the 
most exquisitely constructed stanza; and 
he should be trained to state to his teacher 
and to his fellow students his reason for 
choosing the thought or the stanza. 

Each student should get from a picture, 
song, or poem the elements of uplift and 
power adapted to his own individual nature, 
and to his own stage of development. 
When teachers aim to secure this result 
by methods which do not regard the pupils 
merely as vessels into which may be poured 
the most advanced interpretations of the 
most learned scholars, but as independent 
interpreters, they are doing really vital 
work. Progress by this method may ap- 
pear to be slow at first, but each step gives 
greater power to see independently, and 
therefore gives greater faith. 



Character, ideals, vision 91 

To see is greater than to know. Vision 
is of more value than learning, as a prepara- 
tion for persistent joy in searching for truth 
— the enlarging truth of advancing civiliza- 
tion — and as a qualification for finding the 
special truth and thought needed at each 
stage of the indivdual soul's development 
to stimulate it to a higher degree or a wider 
range of vision. 

No adult interpreter can truly and ef- 
fectively interpret great literature for a 
child or for a youth. The more advanced 
the interpreter, the higher his power, and 
the more profound his learning, the less 
vital and stimulating his interpretation is 
likely to be to an immature student. 

When through childhood and youth an 
individual is trained to use the vision he 
has in searching for the beauty and glory 
in the writings of the leaders who have had 
the highest and truest world vision in re- 
gard to God, and humanity, and growth, 
and duty; when in each succeeding year he 
has read over again his favorite poems or 
his most kindling prose, and has found each 
year new visions of thought and of beauty 



92 Adult and child 

in them that he never saw before, adapted 
to his higher stage of development ; then he 
is ready to study the interpretations of 
others without dwarfing his own vision 
power. 

Froebel used the child's love of nature as 
a means of fixing in his life the apperceptive 
centres of a wider vision power that should 
in later life relate him to the universe and 
to its Creator. A great deal of "Nature 
study" introduced into the schools of the 
world, as a result of the work of Pestalozzi 
and of Froebel is unproductive, because 
their revelations have been misunderstood. 
The word "study" is misleading. The 
common thought has been : we should train 
the children to study Nature when they 
are young, in order that they may enjoy 
the study of Nature when they are older. 
Nature has been studied as a basis for in- 
vestigation and classification. Froebel 
revealed Nature to the child as a growth 
process, as life related to other life, as life 
that may be aided to higher life, and as one 
of the clearest and most unfailingly inter- 
esting revelations of wisdom and unity. 



Character, ideals, vision 93 

Recognizing the value of knowledge after 
it is vitalized by assimilation into the in- 
finitely more important element — the child 
— ^recognizing the essential value of the 
achieving tendency, as a means of trans- 
forming conditions in harmony with new 
ideals; and recognizing the importance of 
training the observant, the conceptive, and 
the reasoning powers, Froebel's whole sys- 
tem aims to kindle and develop the imagi- 
nation and the vision power, so that the 
whole being may be harmoniously bal- 
anced. 

It is not enough that we should under- 
stand the material conditions of our en- 
vironment, and know how to transform 
them. We should be qualified to under- 
stand the higher visions, yet unrevealed in 
knowledge, of yet unseen spiritual beauty, 
and of human relationships to each other 
and to the Divine, that are becoming 
clearer as we climb out of the mists. 



Chapter IX 
The developing of the emotional nature 

"The difference between one man and 
another consists not so much in talent 
as in energy," — Dr. Arnold 

The greatest engine is useless without 
motive power. Character cannot be 
great without well developed motive power. 
A man may possess knowledge; wisdom; 
power to gain more knowledge from books, 
from nature, from experience; well de- 
veloped power to reason; kindled imagin- 
ation and revealing vision power, without 
being an efficient agent in promoting a 
higher civilization. The qualifications 
specified fit him for effective service, but 
in addition he needs motive power to propel 
him to achievement. 

His will is not a sufficient battery to keep 

him working at his best. Men do not do 

their best when they have to be kept at 

work even by their own will power acting 

94 



The emotional nature 95 

in response to a conviction of duty. Man's 
emotional nature is his strongest impelling 
force — his natural battery power. 

His emotions may propel him towards 
good, or towards evil, towards the highest 
in his nature or towards the lowest. Be- 
cause men recognized that res'ponse to 
emotion had great possibilities of deg- 
radat,ion, the trainers of childhood and 
youth before the time of Froebel con- 
sciously tried to weaken and restrict the 
influence of the emotional nature, even 
as many tried to strangle the imaginations 
of children. Steam and electricity un- 
controlled are very dangerous; controlled 
and wisely directed they are powers that 
move the machinery of the world. The 
emotions are the battery powers of char- 
acter. One of the highest duties of the 
trainer of the child is to develop the power 
and the controlling tendency of the child's 
emotions, and to give him self -active di- 
rective power to guide them. 

Froebel knew that if any great element 
or tendency in the life of a child is "stran- 
gled in its cradle", it is not destroyed but 



96 Adult and child 

grows on in the child in a perverted con- 
dition, not as an element of strength, but 
as an element of evil. Plato, Goethe, 
Froebel, and Ruskin understood this law: 
"All evil springs from unused good". This 
is a vital law in child training. Froebel 
made the law clearer by teaching that 
"Evil springs from misused good": that 
every element of goodness in our nature 
will weaken or degrade us, if we misuse 
it. It would be revolutionary in the train- 
ing of children, if educators clearly realized 
the vital meaning of the profoundly true 
law: that the higher the power is, and the 
greater its possibilities of good in the child's 
character, the more rapid and the more 
complete is the degradation of character 
resulting from its misuse. 

The fact that the undeveloped and un- 
trained emotional nature is liable to impel 
towards evil, is not a good reason for trying 
to prevent the development of its power. 
Leading educators until recently spoke 
approvingly of breaking the wills of strong 
willed children. Intelligent men now 
know that the will cannot be too strong. 



The emotional nature 97 

They know also that the thoughtless soul 
surgeons who try to break a child's will, 
are guilty of a crime, compared with which 
the deliberate breaking of his leg would be 
harmless. Power should always be devel- 
oped, never destroyed. To weaken or 
destroy any power must inevitably weaken 
character; worse than this, it warps char- 
acter. 

Neither will power, nor emotional power, 
nor any other great power, should be de- 
stroyed, or weakened, or coerced. Power 
should be developed and strengthened, 
and made more effective in achievement. 
The child loves to achieve. By achieving, 
his own impelling powers and achieving 
powers, are strengthened. So are his con- 
trolling and directive powers. Every 
good, controlling, impelling, and directing 
power attains its best development, when 
the child is creatively achieving his own 
plans. 

Weakening his emotional power robs 
the child of self -impelling power; weaken- 
ing his will robs him of self -directing power; 
coercing the child weakens his interest in 



98 Adult and child 

life. It weakens also his powers of self 
discovery, of self-impelling, and of self 
direction. 

Power is good and only good. It may 
be used for wrong purposes. Children 
through lack of wisdom and of experience 
often do use power for wrong purposes. 
They do so because adulthood has not 
provided appropriate conditions for the 
creative use of the child's powers in trying 
to achieve right. Whatever the reason 
may be, it is unwise and destructive to 
weaken the misused power, when it is only 
necessary to provide more attractive con- 
ditions for doing right. 

The child is naturally creatively oper- 
ative along every line that will develop 
his powers. In his cradle he kicks to 
develop his physical powers. His mother 
does not need to train him to kick. The 
reasonable mother does not tie down his 
legs because he kicks. She gradually 
leads him to play a game that opp6ses 
her power to his by pressing with her hands 
against his little feet, not to stop his kicking, 
but to develop his power to use the muscles 



The emotional nature 99 

of his legs. What a revolution in child 
training would be brought about, if 
throughout his childhood parental power 
and child power worked harmoniously for 
the development of his powers. 

One of the most destructive mistakes 
of child training in the past has been con- 
founding power with the wrong use of pow- 
er. Power is good. Every element of pow- 
er in the physical, injtellectual, and spiritual 
power of a child should be developed. To 
fail to develop a child's power is culpable 
negligence; to weaken any of his powers 
or turn them to destructive elements of 
character, contributes to disastrous failure 
in his life. 

Froebel's whole system aims to develop 
power, never to weaken or destroy it. His 
fundamental law, unity or inner connection, 
made it clear to him that in the develop- 
ment of a child by his own self-activity 
the related balancing powers of life 
and character would be inter-stimulating, 
inter-developing, and inter-directing. 

He planned to develop the emotional 



100 Adult and child 

powers of the child, but at the same time, 
and by the same creative processes he 
developed naturally, in harmony with the 
increase of the propelling force of the 
emotions, corresponding wisdom to direct, 
and achieving power to execute. This pro- 
duces a balanced character, by developing 
the child's powers; instead of an unbal- 
anced and unproductive character which 
is the natural result of failure to develop 
his powers, or of adult interference with 
their normal growth. 

The positive emotions are good. The 
so-called evil emotions are negative. They 
have no really positive existence. They 
exist because their corresponding good emo- 
tions have not had sufifi,cient opportunities 
for development. If love directed our 
lives vitally, there would be no room for 
hate. Courage developed vitally, makes 
fear impossible. 

The duty of adulthood is to develop 
the right emotions of a child, and to make 
them strong, dominant, impelling, battery 
powers in his life. Failure to achieve 
our plans or to perform revealed duty, 



The emotional nature 101 

does not result from lack of knowledge. 
If men did as well as they know, the world 
would make progress much more rapidly 
towards a higher civilization, and Christ's 
ideals would be more quickly and effectively 
realized. If men universally did the 
brotherly thing they know to be needful, 
and that they have power to do, they 
would grow more triumphantly in char- 
acter power, and be infinitely happier, 
because of new revelations through duty 
done. 

The child or man who is conscious of 
a revelation of duty which he has power 
to perform, and who fails to try to perform 
that duty, weakens by his failure one of 
the most important elements of his char- 
acter. When a man fails to try to per- 
form a duty of which he is clearly con- 
scious, he has not merely failed to do some- 
thing for his fellowmen, he has clouded 
his vision of duty, weakened the vitality 
of his conscience, and lost part of the power 
that impels him to achieve. It will be 
harder in future for duty to reveal itself 
to him, and his battery power will have 



102 Adult and child 

to be stronger than before in order to move 
him to right action. 

It is a dangerous practice to stir the true 
emotional nature of a child without imme- 
diately revealing to him an opportunity 
for the aroused emotion to impel him to 
the achievement of some necessary de- 
sirable good. There is danger in the 
emotional training of some Sunday schools, 
because the impelling force of the aroused 
emotions is not used in right effort. The 
stirring of the emotion is good, if it is used 
in impelling the child towards correspond- 
ing activity. 

The ultimate aim of character training 
is effort to achieve our visions of right. 
The stronger the effort the more vital 
the character. The direction of the effort 
depends largely on our enlightened con- 
science and will; the energy of the effort 
depends largely on the vital development 
or the emotional nature. When any 
good purpose is aroused, if its stimulating 
motive power is kindled without the arous- 
ing and kindling leading to prompt and 
energetic efforts to achieve, there has been 



The emotional nature 103 

a disastrous failure. Failure is always 
disastrous, when character has not enough 
battery power to achieve our plans. 

Froebel saw the inherent weakness of 
the old character training ideals. He 
believed that the Creator made man with 
a wondrous capacity for growth. He 
believed that the development of every 
power in man, is essential in making him 
truly operative for right. He believed 
that the development of his intellectual 
and spiritual powers, was possible far 
beyond what had been understood and 
believed before his time. He believed 
that the power of each man is of supreme 
value to him and to his race. He believed 
that failure to develop any one of man's 
powers weakened all his other powers. 
He believed that coercive interference 
with the development of a child's power 
is a crime against the child and against 
humanity. 

He was the first to make training of the- 
emotional powers a definite purpose in 
education, and therefore his system of 
training and its underlying philosophy^ 



104 Adult and child 

should be studied carefully by all who 
are responsible for improving present 
methods of character training. 

In his mother play, Froebel revealed to 
mothers how to kindle the elements of 
power in children, including emotional, 
power. 

In the songs, the stories, and the imagin- 
ative and trade plays, he starts the great 
emotions to grow so that in due time the 
child may become a man not only wise, 
and self-directing, but persistently achiev- 
ing; because he is stimulated by propelling 
emotions; emotions that act not independ- 
ently of wisdom and of will, but in harmony 
with them. 



Chapter X 
The development of respect for law 

The old training is based on the beHef 
that the children dislike law. This mis- 
conception led to most of the mistakes of 
the past in child training. It is especially 
to blame for the blind faith in coercion. 
No advocate of coercion ever claimed that 
it is a source of development. Some still 
say it stops wrong doing. Even if coercion 
could stop wrong doing by children, it 
would be a weak, negative, and ineffective 
system of training. The child develops by 
doing, not by not doing. As has already 
been pointed out, coercion is the lowest, 
the least effective, and most power per- 
verting stage in the progressive sequence 
of training ideals; coercion, co-operation, 
and creativity. 

All children naturally love law. All 
children as naturally dislike tyranny. It 
is clearly a good element of character to 
105 



106 Adult and child 

dislike tyranny. Parental tyranny, or 
teacher tyranny, is quite as presumptuous, 
and quite as destructive of power, as nation- 
al tyranny. Despotism is as dangerous 
in the home or school as in the state. True 
growth in the nation or in the individual, 
must be based on freedom. 

Children love law and respect it till 
tyranny, somewhere in the home or school, 
robs them, of their productive love and 
respect. Respect for law is one of the 
fundamental elements of good character, 
and of good citizenship. It is an element 
in the child's character naturally. The 
failure to develop it consciously by definite, 
systematic methods is culpable negligence, 
on the part of parents and teachers. The 
common practice of coercion by which the 
child is forced to lose respect for law, and 
to become antagonistic to it, is appallingly 
character weakening. 

"But" say objectors, "the parent is 
responsible for the child, and parenthood 
is compelled to be coercive in order to stop 
the child from doing wrong." There is a 
short period during infancy, when it may 



Respect for law 107 

be necessary, occasionally, to save the 
infant from accident, or to save property 
from injury by prompt action of a restrain- 
ing nature. Even then parents should 
avoid the evil effects of interference, which 
are generally more disastrous to character 
than the infant's action would have been 
to its body or to property. If interference 
is accompanied by joyous laughter and 
loving embrace instead of by coercive 
order in a high key, solemn threatening, 
sudden snatching, or menacing gesture, 
the child may be saved from humiliation 
and from consciousness of coercive inter- 
ference. 

The parent is responsible for the child, 
and his highest responsibility is for the 
development of all the elements of power 
in the child's life. Stopping wrong doing 
does not produce right doing. Worse 
than this, stopping wrong doing interferes 
with the development of the child's most 
productive tendency — the tendency to do — 
which not only is the most productive 
tendency of the child, but is the tendency 
that gives final value to every other good 



108 Adult and child 

element in the child's character. Stopping 
doing is essentially bad training. 

If as much training were devoted to 
doing, as has been devoted to don'ting 
there would be little reason for parents 
or teachers to even think of the absurd 
and destructive coercion of the past. Even 
during infancy it is possible to surround 
the child by conditions that will make 
serious danger to him practically impos- 
sible, and to supply him with materials 
for occupation of great variety and strong 
interest to him, of such a natiire that he 
cannot injure himself or damage furniture 
or other property in the home. It is easy 
if we study the child's progressive interests 
and his developing tendencies and powers 
to provide him, at practically no expense, 
with materials for his constructive use 
which will keep him interested and happy, 
and at the same time will develop his skill, 
and his transforming and achieveing ten- 
dencies. 

A child never objects to the laws of his 
games. He may dispute vigorously in 
regard to the occurrences of the game. lie 



Respect for law 109 

will argue in regard to the "balls" and 
"strikes", or question whether the batter 
reached first base before the ball, but he 
never questions the law. One of the 
chief aims of adulthood should be to pre- 
serve and develop the child's natural 
respect for the law, and make it one of the 
dominant elements in guiding him in de- 
ciding his conduct in all his life relations. 

The child's respect for the laws of the 
game, should naturally be developed into 
respect for the laws of his school, into 
respect for the laws of his municipality, 
into respect for the laws of his country, 
and away above these into respect for the 
laws of his own life and growth, and in- 
finitely above these into respect for the 
laws of God. 

This development in conscious respect 
for law is as natural as any other growth 
of the child, if it is not interfered with. 
When adidthood gets a reverent faith in 
the child, the child's respect for law -will 
never be lost. 

It is impossible to develop a truly pro- 



110 Adult and child 

gressive respect for law, so long as adult- 
hood believes that children dislike law. 
It was natural, and it is still natural for 
adults who believe that the child dislikes 
law, to try to make him fear the law. 
Weak types may be held in bond by fear, 
but fear never develops respect. Some 
thoughtless people still confound fear of 
law, and respect for law. They are abso- 
lutely diverse; the one makes the other 
impossible. Fear of law prevents respect 
for law. Respect for law robs law of its 
terror. Fear is always devitalizing; res- 
pect is always vitalizing. 

Froebel in every occupation, in every 
operative process, and in every game in 
the kindergarten, makes law essential 
as the sure guide to greater achievement. 
The first day the child is at school in his 
kindergarten, he learns, by revealing opera- 
tive processes, the law of opposites, or of 
balance, or of harmony, or of related unity 
by making his "form of beauty" after he 
has made his "first cut". He may make 
hundreds of "forms of beauty" afterwards, 
and in doing so he follows the same great 



Respect for law 111 

law, although he never repeats the pattern 
of his first "form of beauty." Each "form 
of beauty" is a new creation, and he knows 
he could not make one of them without 
the law of opposites. In the course of 
his experience this law becomes a part of 
his conscious life. Without this law he 
might have cut and pasted paper for years 
without making one harmonious form of 
beauty. 

In this way he comes to know that 
law is his guide, and recognizes law as his 
friend. He recognizes law as a directive 
and not a restrictive force in his life ; a force 
that leads to doing and not to don'ting. 

Law is a positive element in the kinder- 
garten, and not a negative element. It 
helps the child to achieve instead of inter- 
fering with his efforts to achieve. He is 
taught this great lesson not in words, but 
by operative processes that follow laws of 
which he has become conscious. Operative 
processes are the only processes by which 
great laws may be wrought into character. 

The law of opposites, or balance, or 



112 Adult and child 

harmony, or related unity, will evolve in 
the child's life as he grows older, and will 
reveal to him the need of balanced powers 
in his character. It will gradually qualify 
him to understand the rhythmic harmony 
of the universe. 

In the same paper cutting and pasting 
occiipation already considered, the child 
has revealed to him the law of sequence. 
As he is taught to make fold after fold and 
cut after cut, he learns that they follow one 
another in a logical and definitely related 
sequence, and when he is older this law 
makes reasoning in logical sequence a 
natural process. 

It should be remembered, too, that the 
revelation of law as a guide to successful 
achievement, is but one of several dis- 
tinctively educational results of the single 
occupation of cutting and pasting. This 
is true of all the occupations of the kinder- 
garten. Throughout the whole range of 
his occupations, his games, and his plays, 
the child's success is achieved by his obe- 
dience to law. 



Respect for law 113 

Most child trainers still demand obedi- 
ence to themselves instead of obedience 
to law, and respect for themselves instead 
of respect for law. By doing so they lose 
the sympathetic respect of the child, and 
prevent the development of respect for 
law, as a conscious element in his being, 
as one of the most essential qualifications 
for good citizenship, and for reliability of 
character. 

"The perfect law of liberty" is one of 
the most profound expressions in the Bible. 
It reveals the vital truth that law and lib- 
erty should be in perfect harmony; that 
control and freedom are in no sense in con- 
flict. Froebel aimed to make the kinder- 
garten '*A free republic of childhood". 
This is the highest conception of the train- 
ing of childhood yet revealed to man; 
that the child should be ever under law — 
but always free; guided by the same funda- 
mental laws as his fellows, but under these 
laws free to achieve his own original plans 
independently. In this way he learns to 
respect law and to respect himself, as a 
being capable of understanding the "perfect 



114 Adult and child 

law of liberty", and capable also of cre- 
ative achievement by following directive 
law. 

Character training will be revolutionized, 
when men understand the inner m.eaning 
of the Bible expression "the perfect law 
of liberty", and when homes and schools 
become "Free republics of childhood". 

Many very intelligent people yet shudder 
at the mere suggestion of freedom for 
children. Some of them do not hesitate 
to blame the kindergarten for the disrespect 
for authority on the part of many children, 
although they know absolutely nothing 
about kindergarten philosophy, or true 
kindergarten practice. Gladstone, at 
seventy, said the one criticism he had to 
make of the teachers in the school he had 
attended was that "They were afraid of 
liberty". History, and experience in our 
own time prove that there is most anarchy, 
where there is least freedom. Anarchy 
is the son of coercion — not of freedom. 
Men's minds will always be confused in 
regard to child freedom, until they defi- 
nitely comprehend the difference between 



Respect for law 1 1 5 

"Liberty under law", and liberty without 
law. 

There are thousands of schools now, 
since Froebel's ideal of "Free republics of 
childhood" was revealed, in which there 
are never any cases of "discipline" such 
as used to occupy so much time, and cause 
so much sorrow, and dwarf the originality 
and the power of so many children. Yet 
the pupils in these schools are attentive, 
interested, progressive, co-operative, and 
creatively self-active in vital processes to 
a much greater extent and to a much 
higher degree than in the schools of former 
days, which were in no sense "Free re- 
publics of childhood", not even constitu- 
tional monarchies, but were absolute, 
despotic monarchies in which arbitrary 
law and authority were dogmatically es- 
tablished, and despotically administered. 

Democratic principles are sure to tri- 
umph ultimately. Good democratic citi- 
zenship is not promoted by despotism even 
in the control of childhood. There should 
be perfect harmony between control and 
freedom. The success of democracy is 



116 Adult and child 

essentially dependent on consciousness of 
the true meaning of the "Perfect law of 
liberty". 

The kindergarten is a perfect democracy 
in which the natural respect of the child 
for law is fostered and developed, and in 
which law is recognized as essential to suc- 
cess in every department of the child's 
work. It is absolutely impossible that 
any man who studies the work of a good 
kindergarten, and the philosophy on which 
the work is based, can believe that a 
kindergarten could weaken a child's vital 
respect for law and order. 

Froebel said "If national order is to be 
recognized in later years as a benefit, child- 
hood must first be accustomed to law and 
order, and therein find the means of free- 
dom." 

Froebel's greatest contemporary inter- 
preter — the Baroness Von Marenholz- 
Bulow wrote — "Nothing is left then, but 
to set free obedience in the place of blind 
obedience, and to render the masses through 
civilization capable of seeing that only 
the self-restraint of individuals and their 



Respect for law 117 

voluntary subjection to law, make greater 
freedom in society possible. That mode 
of education which can solve this prob- 
lem may justly be called education for 
freedom." 

Froebel's system aims to lead to the 
future free and conscious obedience to 
law, and thereby lead at the same time to 
the highest possible degree of freedom. 

There may be deadness under law, or 
life under law. We may develop respect 
for law as a dominant element in character 
by making law the supervising partner in 
the child's creative work, or we may de- 
velop a dislike for law by making it merely 
the subordinate agent of coercion. We 
may reveal law as beneficence, or as 
enslavement. 



Chapter XI 

The development of conscious responsibility 

Responsibility, self-consciousness, and 
self-control were treated negatively in the 
old training. Children were made con- 
scious of weakness, not of power. Respon- 
sibility meant responsibility for the wrong 
we did, not for the right we have power 
and opportunity to do. Self -consciousness 
meant consciousness of weakness, not 
consciousness of strength. Self-control 
meant power to resist temptation and keep 
away from evil, instead of power to use 
the achieving elements in our natures to 
promote the development of humanity, 
and transform conditions in the way of 
advancing civilization. 

Of course \ye are responsible for the 
wrong we do, but there is no vitality in 
that thought. There is vitality in the 
thought that I have power to do something 
for God and humanity better than any 
118 



Conscious responsibility 119 

other man. There is some vision I alone 
have power to see truly. I am responsible 
for seeing my vision and for achieving my 
work. The consciousness of this is the 
only basis on which a vital propelling recog- 
nition of my responsibility can rest. The 
new training makes a child conscious of his 
special power, his individuality, his self- 
hood, and reveals his relationships to his 
fellowmen, so that he becomes clearly re- 
sponsible for the use of his selfhood in the 
achievement of his part in promoting the 
highest interests of humanity. The con- 
sciousness of special power logically leads 
to the consciousness of special duty. The 
new training reveals the highest duty of 
each child to attain to his highest individu- 
ality in order that organized and related 
hunianity may be aided by him in taking- 
its next upward step. 

Life is a success in proportion to our 
achievement of good; it is a failure in pro- 
portion to the amount of good we might, 
have done, but failed to do. 

Even the recent books on moral training 
that are not based on the philosophy o£ 



120 Adult and child 

Froebel, treat self-control as a power to 
resist temptation and to keep away from 
evil. A very modern book written by a 
very able man, gives as an illustration of 
self-control, the power of a reformed drunk- 
ard to resist the temptation to drink, and 
to keep away from the saloon in which he 
formerly wasted his life and his money. 
It is better to resist wrong than to yield to 
it. It is clear, however, that a man may 
keep away from the saloon and from every 
other form of evil, and yet achieve nothing 
for God or for humanity. 

There is no vitality in negative goodness. 
There is small reason to boast of making 
a being created in the image of God, a 
mere dodger of defects. Training must 
do more than guide him away from evil; 
it must fill his life with propelling deter- 
mination to do good — to do his special kind 
of good — and develop his achieving powers 
so that he may be able to carry out his 
plans successfully. This is true the mean- 
ing of self-control. 

Responsibility has been revealed in the 
past as a solemn duty. It should be re- 



Conscious responsibility 121 

vealed to the children as a great privilege. 
There should be no solemnity associated 
with responsibility. Duty will be joyous 
when children are properly trained; when 
creativity is universally substituted for 
coercion; when spontaneity and control 
are seen to be elements of the same unity; 
when liberty and law are known to be in 
harmony. 

Loving service can never become com- 
pulsory service. Service should become 
increasingly joyous throughout life. Men 
destroy the elements of joyous service by 
wrong ideals of training, and then marvel 
that it so generally dies as an effective, 
spontaneous element in character. 

There can be no other joy so completely 
satisfying, or as richly developing to a man, 
as the successful achievement of original 
and unselfish plans. 

Responsibility should reveal our most 
attractive fields of happiness, and provide 
our most stimulating interests in our con- 
scious upward progress. It will do so, 
when all the children have their individual 
powers kindled; their achieving tendencies 



122 Adult and child 

developed; their organic unity with the 
race revealed; their responsibility for 
making their impress on civilization, by 
achieving the good they have power to do, 
made clear to them; and their faith in them- 
selves as the representatives of the Divine, 
made the supreme motive of their lives. 

"Idealism" some say, who lack the true 
vision. The world makes all progress by 
struggling towards higher ideals. No 
thoughtful man or woman is satisfied with 
the results of child training in the past. 

Humanity needs to be guided by a new 
idealism in character training. Froebel 
has given a new interpretation of Christ's 
ideals, and his interpretation i,s the most 
reasonable, and the most hopeful yet 
given to humaiiity.. 



Chapter XII 

Adulthood should make the child conscious 
of power: never of weakness 

Self-consciousness has been regarded 
as a weakness. There are two kinds of 
self-consciousness of power. By making 
a child conscious of weakness I make 
him weaker; by making him conscious of 
his power I am kindling the elements that 
will keep him growing towards the Divine, 
by making him conscious of power to 
achieve I am making him conscious of 
power to achieve for the Divine. Each 
child represents a thought of God, and a 
plan of God. I should reveal this glory of 
his birth-right to him in every way possible 
so that he may climb triumphantly through 
life with achieving faith in God, and in 
himself. 

Whoever contributes in any way to mak- 
ing a child conscious of weakness or badness 
is developing weakness or evil in the child. 
By calling a child "bad," I am defining 
123 



124 Adult and child 

the ideal of badness in his mind and life. 
I am not defining the ideal of abstract 
badness, but of badness in him. There 
is a strange and altogether degrading 
anomaly in calling a being created in the 
image of God "bad". Twisted he may be; 
a great organism out of order he may be. 
My duty is to find out what is the matter 
with his organism and set it right, so that 
his organism may grow more freely and 
truly. He is a musical instrument making 
discord. My duty is to get him in tune 
with the universe, so that he may produce 
divine harmony. I should never call him 
"bad." I should watch for any act of his 
that is generous or brave, or kind, or manly, 
and when he and I are alone, I should let 
him know with hearty appreciation that I 
saw him do it, and that I am proud of him 
for doikig it. It may be that a special 
hand clasp of appreciation may be better 
than words. I should be ever on the alert 
to plan opportunities for service by him 
for some one whom he can help. 

The old theology was to a large extent 
responsible for making humanity self- 



Consciousness of power, not of weakness 125 

conscious of weakness. It taught that 
self-faith was sinful. It preached spurious 
humility. It persistently told us we were 
"worms" — "poor, unworthy worms of the 
dust". Wormy Christians are useless. 
They are right in calling themselves "un- 
worthy". They might use stronger ad- 
jectives and still be within the mark. 

Compared with the Divine Creator, 
we are but worms. But we represent His 
plans; we are thoughts of God. He sent 
us here to be His representative partners. 
We should use our powers to achieve the 
visions He gives us, instead of calling 
ourselves "worms". 

When Marmion had done the work as- 
signed by the English King at the court 
of the Scotch King, the Scotch King rec- 
ognized that Marmion was his guest till 
he got out of Scotland on his way back to 
London, so he asked the Border Chieftain 
Douglas to entertain Marmion. 

Douglas despised Marmion, but he obey- 
ed his King. He entertained Marmion 
courteously till the morning, when Mar- 



126 Adult and child 

mion and his troop stood ready in the court- 
yard to depart. Then Marmion cordially 
extended his hand to shake the hand of 
his host. Douglas scornfully refused to 
take the offered hand and said: 

"My castles are my king's alone 
From turret to foundation stone. 
The hand of Douglas is his own, 
And never shall in friendly grasp 
The hand of such as Marmion clasp." 

That would have daunted most men 
but Marmion stood up and bravely replied: 

"He who does England's message here, 
Although the meanest in her state. 
May well, proud Angus, be thy mate. ' ' 

That should be our spirit. We are not 
here as individuals merely. We are here as 
representatives of our King. We are truly 
unworthy representatives, if we whine and 
call ourselves "worms". 

We should make our children self-con- 
scious of strength, not of weakness. We 
should teach and act as if we believed that 



Consciousness of power, not of weakness 127 

Christ came not merely that we should 
have power, "but power more abundantly". 
We should teach that "more abundant 
power" is ever the reward for honest effort 
to achieve the vision of today. 



Chapter XIII 

Control and spontaneity 

"The Child is the Sum of the World" 
— Emerson. 

"Let Childhood ripen in Childhood" 
— Froebel. 

If a man is to be free at maturity he 
must be free in the subordinate stages of 
childhood arid* youth. 

There may be perfect harmony between 
control and spontaneity. 

The true ideal between parent and child 
is what the Bible calls the "perfect law of 
liberty". 

The child develops by what he does him- 
self, and plans himself. If any meddle- 
some or inconsiderate parent or other adult 
interferes with his work and prevents his 
spontaneous activity either through kind- 
ness or ignorance, he arrests the develop- 
ment of the child's best powers. 

The child's interest cannot be fully arous- 
128 



Control and spontaneity 129 

ed by plans made by others — especially 
plans made by adults. 

The little girl who said, "What is the 
use of having a planner of my own, if I 
have to keep doing what you plan", was 
wiser than her mother. Self-activity is the 
basis of vital character training. 

Training should mean development. 
Development should mean free growth. 
Free growth results from self -activity, 
which means the free action of the child 
in trying to achieve his own plans. 

The child develops more completely 
and more rapidly by action directed by 
others than by study, but action under the 
direction of others develops his least essen- 
tial powers, and these only to a limited ex- 
tent, and very imperfectly. Powers de- 
veloped by action under the direction of 
others, do not promote the self-develop- 
ment of the greatest powers in the child. 

The only complete development of a 
child must be attained by free activity in 
trying to achieve his own plans. 

If we keep the child in an environment 
of materials suitable for the kindling of 



130 Adult and child 

productive interests during the successive 
stages of his related periods of intellectual 
and spiritual growth, and allow him free- 
dom in using these materials, his selfhood 
or highest power will develop, and its de- 
velopment will give a new and higher value 
to all his other powers. 

The development of a child's selfhood 
really means the awakening and growth 
of his re-creative, and creating powers. 

Activity in response to the direction of 
adults during the child's early years not 
only fails to make the child creative, it 
prevents the development of his creative 
power. 

The only possible way in which a child's 
creative power and tendency can be devel- 
oped is by self-activity — ^that is activity 
in carrying out his own plans. 

The greatest revelation that can ever be 
made to a child is the revelation of his 
selfhood, or individuality, or the special 
image of God in him. This is the element 
in him which must be developed in order 
that he may do his special part in promoting 
the true progress of humanity. 



Control and spontaneity 131 

Without the development of his selfhood 
a child cannot become a true representative 
of his Creator. 

No form of coercion ever kindled a soul. 

Every form of coercion dwarfs the self- 
hood and the creative power of a child. 

Every child loves to work in co-operation 
with father or mother until by some act 
of disrespect or of tyranny the golden bond 
of unity between the child and his parents 
is broken. The child never breaks the 
bond. 



Chapter XIV 
Courtesy and reverence 

One of the much used maxims in regard 
to child training has been : "Children shotild 
be reverent to their elders". It is of much 
greater importance that the "elders" should 
be reverent to the children. 

When all the elders are vitally reverent 
to children — not to their own children only, 
but to all children — then all children will 
naturally be reverent to their elders. 

When all parents and other adults are 
genuinely courteous to the children, the 
children will be as genuinely courteous to 
adults and to each other, as their seniors 
are to them and to each other. 

Vital reverence and genuine courtesy 
were never developed in a child's char- 
acter by demanding them. They grow 
in the child heart not in response to orders 
from adults, but in response to reverence 
and courtesy from adults. 
132 



Courtesy and reverence 133 

The reverence and courtesy of adults 
must be real. They must not be super- 
ficial forms merely, they must be the joyous 
expression of true feelings of reverence and 
courtesy in the hearts of the adults. 

Demanding and ordering courtesy from 
a child makes courtesy a formal matter, 
and prevents the outgrowth of real courtesy 
from within the child's heart. The re- 
sponse of the child is not true courtesy. 

The reverence given on order is not 
genuine reverence, it is awe combined with 
fear. 

Reverence and courtesy compelled from 
the child injure the child in two ways; 
by preventing the growth of true reverence 
and vital courtesy in his heart, and by com- 
pelling him to be a hypocrite. 

A hypocrite is the meanest thing that 
can be made out of a being created in the 
image of God. 

Reverence and courtesy given in response 
to loving reverence and genuine consider- 
ation are as natural as the response of the 
leaf buds and flower buds to the warmth 
of the sunshine in the Spring. 



134 Adult and child 

The greatest need of humanity in all 
its dealings with the child is a more pro- 
found reverence for the child himself, and 
for the essential value of the individual 
soul. 

Reverence for the individual soul is the 
real foundation for freedom; for democracy 
as revealed by Christ. 



Chapter XV 
Freedom and obedience 

Freedom has meant merely freedom for 
men; it now means freedom for women too. 
Freedom for the child will be the greatest 
step in human development. 

"Free obedience must take the place of 
blind obedience." 

All children love to be obedient till some- 
one chills their love. 

"All evil springs from unused good." 
So said Plato, Goethe, Ruskin. It is clear- 
ly true that misused good develops into its 
corresponding evil. So does every unde- 
veloped element in the child's nature. 

Obedience perverted by parental or other 
adult unwisdom naturally and inevitably 
degenerates into disobedience. 

Respect for law in the child naturally 
becomes rebellion against law, when adults 
are tyrannical and coercive. 

Every good element in the nature of a 
135 



136 Adult and child 

child will degrade him if it is undeveloped 
or misused. This should be one of the 
most suggestive truths to all who have the 
privilege of assisting in the training of 
children, because the higher the good ele- 
ment in a child's heart is, the more quickly 
and the more deeply it will degrade him 
if unused, or especially if misused. 

The highest way in which adulthood can 
co-operate with childhood in its develop- 
ment, is by guiding it in the use of the good 
elements in its life. 

Law should be directive to the child, 
instead of restrictive. 

The child loves the law of the game, 
and all directive law. This love of law 
which is nattiral in the child's life is capable 
of growth till it becomes one of the supreme 
elements in his developed and still develop- 
ing moral nature. 

When law is used coercively love of law 
becomes hatred of tyranny, and the child 
gets a character-destroying attitude to law. 

Respect for the law of the game should 
develop, will develop, under respectful 



Freedom and obedience 137 

guidance by making law a directive instead 
of a restraining force, into respect for law 
in the school, and in society — in town, city, 
state and empire or country; and ulti- 
mately into conscious respect for the laws 
of our own lives and for the laws of God. 



Chapter XVI 

Coercion weakens 

Coercion in every form interferes with 
growth, and must therefore prevent the 
use of the good elements in the lives of 
children. 

Coercion weakens and degrades character 
because it interferes with the use of the 
child's powers, and all unused or misused 
powers for good are certain to become 
powers for evil, negatively or positively, 
usually both. 

Coercion may stop wrong doing, but 
only while the coercive agent is present; 
and even then it is the most ineffectual, 
the most dangerous, and the most com- 
temptible means of stopping wrong doing. 

The old training stopped, when it could, 
not only wrong doing, but doing. Doing 
what the child plans is the supreme way 
of developing a child's selfhood and making 
him conscious of it, of revealing his other 
188 



Coercion weakens 139 

powers related to his selfhood, and of un- 
folding to him higher visions of duty. 

When doing makes a child conscious of 
his special power, it gives him the only 
true revelation of his duty to God and to 
man. 

Coercion must dwarf power, and when 
dwarfed and unused, power becomes de- 
structive of character. Evil springs from 
misused good. 

If you always plan for a boy, his own 
power to plan will become useless; worse 
than this, it will become an element of evil 
instead of good. 

When authority is substituted for reason, 
the child will become unreasonable. 

The child should have a life of his own, 
and in it he should make his own plans, 
and try independently to work them out. 

In the range of his own life you should 
be his partner, to provide him with ma- 
terials and tools to carry out his plans, not 
yours. 

It is impertinence and destructive im- 
pertinence for you to interfere with your 



140 Adult and child 

child, when he is trying to achieve his own 
plans in his own life department. 

In his own department the child should 
be free to decide what to do as well as how 
to do it. Your duty is to approve his 
effort — not from a man's standpoint but 
from a child's. 



Chapter XVII 
Co-operation stimulates 

The parent who shows real interest in 
a child's work, and who expresses kindly- 
appreciation of his efforts will help to kindle 
his boy better than he could in any other 
way, and to kindle him is the most vitally 
productive result that can be achieved 
in the development of his character and 
his power. 

The father should be ready to respond 
cheerfully and help his child, when he has 
made a plan too great for him to work 
out alone. Such co-operation, when the 
father's experience and skill help to achieve 
the child's plan, will form a bond of unity 
between father and son of a vitally pro- 
ductive character. 

A boy whose father is his partner in his 
work, will be glad to be his father's partner 
in his father's work. 

Every boy whose father is respectful 
to him rejoices to be his father's partner 
141 



142 Adult and child 

in doing work planned by his father for the 
benefit of the home. 

Work should be joy, not merely labor. 

When a boy works with his father he is 
proud to have the honor of doing so, and 
gradually he will become conscious of his 
power to render joyous and loving service 
to father and the other members of the 
family. 

Father should be careful always not to 
chill his son's joy by criticism of his work. 
Praise the child's work. Remember to 
think of the effort he makes, not of the in- 
trinsic value of the result of his effort. 

West, the great portrait painter, said 
his mother's kiss made him a painter. She 
found him trying to paint a portrait of the 
baby, when he was a boy, and enthusias- 
tically kissed him. 

West's portrait of the baby was a crude 
picture with many defects. His mother 
might have criticised it, and destroyed his 
interest. She kissed him and kindled him 
at the centre of his greatest power. 

The four-year-old girl is sweeping with 
her little broom. Mother says, "0 Susan, 



Co-operation stimulates 143 

you are in mother's way." At four Susan 
enjoyed working for mother. When she was 
graduated from high school at eighteen 
she had power to help, but she had lost 
the joy of service. Who robbed her of that 
elemental moral power? Not God! Not 
the devil. Mother did. 

Men used to believe that the more dis- 
tasteful work is to a child the more it de- 
veloped his character. Vitally productive 
work always gives joy — joy in planning, 
joy in working, joy in achieving. Sorrow 
and tears are opposed to the best develop- 
ment of a child. 

Men with the mournful philosophy of 
evil and without vital faith in God taught 
that as "the earth is a vale of tears" children 
should be trained to endure sorrow when 
young so that they might be able to en- 
dure the evils they would meet in daily life, 
when they grow up. 

Children must not be trained to endure 
evil but to overcome it. 



Chapter XVIII 
Life should be joyous 

Children should be trained to see that 
the world is full of joy, so that when they 
meet sorrow they will be sure — with an 
absolute sureness — that they have within 
their reach tinlimited joy to enable them to 
overcome their sorrow. 

Children trained to believe that life 
should be joyous — not teary — will find at 
maturity that their sorrows have not left 
any scars on their hearts. Their joys live 
on as elements of power to brighten their 
own lives and the lives of their friends. 

You may train children to reject the sor- 
rows that come to them and retain in their 
lives only the joys. 

It is a crime against the child to put a 
blight on his happiness. The old faith in 
solemnity in the home and school was evil 
in its every influence on young life. 

Whoever puts a smile on a child's face 
is working for God. 
144 



Life should he joyous 145 

The surest way to keep a child happy 
is to let him play and work, without impu- 
dently planning his play or his work. 

The reason a child is happier at play and 
at work than at an^^ other time, is that 
play and work are the only supremely vital 
agencies for developing the child com- 
pletely, physically, intellectually and spirit- 
ually. The reason they are thus develop- 
ing is that they develop the powers of joy- 
ous interest and productively constructive 
achievement in his character. 

The development of joy power and 
achieving power should be two of the su- 
preme aims in child training. 

"But," many yet say, "the child does not 
like work. He will play all day but he soon 
tires of work." Every child likes work. 
He soon tires of work I plan for him. If he 
continued to work energetically at work 
I plan for him, it would be a proof that his 
original power had been dwarfed by bad 
training. 

No boy tires of working with materials 
suited to his stage of development, if he is 
free to make and the carry out his plans. 



146 Adult and child 

"I suppose a boy would work all day if 
you let him do as he likes," answers the 
old trainer. Doing things he likes to do, 
is the only process by which he may learn 
to transform conditions in harmony with 
his own plans based on his own vision; 
and, therefore, it is the most vital training 
process for making a transformer of con- 
ditions in adulthood. 

If you train your child. by allowing him 
to work at what he likes to do, when he is 
a child, work in manhood will not be labor, 
it will still be joy. 

A man who is not on the alert in adult- 
hood to see conditions that should be trans- 
formed into better conditions can never 
become a truly vital citizen. Allowed to 
work freely at work he likes because he 
plans it, a child becomes an independent 
representative of the Divine who works 
joyously for the purposes revealed to him. 



Chapter XIX 

Achieving vision 

All children are transformers of con- 
ditions as soon as they can creep. This 
reveals the most productive tendency in 
human character. That most men have 
practically lost this tendency in manhood 
is the clearest evidence of the weakness 
and destructiveness of the training of the 
past. The saddest tragedy of human life 
is -the loss of this tendency to achieve our 
visions. Bad training has robbed most 
men of vision power, and of achieving 
power. 

Froude says, "Every one of us whatever 
our speculative opinions knows better 
than he practises, and recognizes a better 
law than he obeys." This is the great hu- 
man tragedy. When we first crept we 
tried to achieve every vision that we saw. 
God meant this tendency to continue to 
grow stronger in us. We lose the tendency 
147 



148 Adult and child 

because our training is dwarfing our indi- 
vidual power. 

The tendency to achieve our visions 
and our plans should increase in power more 
rapidly than any other power, because it 
is the most productive element in our char- 
acter. The highest elements of character 
should develop most rapidly. 

It is a serious crime against a child to 
rob him of his greatest power — his natural 
achieving tendency. We do this always 
when we substitute our motives or plans 
for his by compulsion, or when we merely 
stop his doing. 

Don'ting and stopping are essentially 
evil and weaken human power in its highest 
department. Negative training produces 
negative character. 

To change the natural positive achieving 
tendency into the negative type that in 
adulthood knows better than it does, is 
the most serious crime against childhood. 
This crime produces the greatest human 
tragedy. 

We may help to produce men and women 
who do not do as well as they know by 



Achieving vision 149 

teaching them good principles without in- 
creasing their battery power. You may 
know very clearly that you wish to drive 
your automobile up the hill ahead of you, 
but you will not get up the hill unless the 
battery power of your machine is in good 
order. 

The emotional power of a man is the 
battery power of his life, and it should be 
very carefully trained. 

You may weaken the influence of your 
child for good not merely by failure to de- 
velop his emotional nature, but by develop- 
ing his good feelings without guiding him 
to achieve the good he plans in response 
to his good thoughts and his good feelings 
or emotions. 

Some people used to think they had re- 
ligion when they stirred their feelings to 
the glory thrill by singing emotional hymns. 
They were merely weakly selfish, happy 
because they had temporary thrills of over- 
powering emotion. 

When good emotion is kindled in the life 
of a child it becomes too often a weakness 
instead of a blessing because it is not used 



150 Adult and child 

in impelling him to the doing of some 
definite good, This is one of many illus- 
trations of the philosophic truth that 
"Evil springs from unused good." 

"But" persists the objector, "while the 
child may work all day, if we let him do 
what he likes to do, he won't stick to one 
kind of work." His work would not be 
very developing to him if he did "stick to 
one kind of work". If he does ten kinds 
of work each day he has become conscious 
of power to transform conditions in ten 
ways, so this result is ten times more im- 
portant than transforming in only one way. 
As he grows older he will become conscious 
of moral conditions which he should help 
to transform into better conditions, and he 
will have the transforming habit. 

The only vital way you can develop the 
transforming habit is by providing suita- 
ble materials and tools (not a box of tools) 
for your child and giving him freedom in 
planning and carrying out his plans. You 
should show vital sympathy with him, 
and appreciate his efforts. You should be 



Achieving vision 151 

ready with advice and help, when he asks 
for it — but not before. 

No adult can make plans that will fully 
arouse the interest of a child. 

By making a child's plans for him, you 
rob him of initiative ; of power to plan inde- 
pendently, so that he may become creative 
and not merely imitative; of the essential 
power of vision; and of the achieving power 
which is the supreme power that most 
completely develops his other powers and 
gives them real value to humanity and to 
his Creator. 



Chapter XX 
Hahits 

Locke said, "The great thing is what 
habits you settle." Another educational 
writer has said, "Good habits are better 
than good principles." Think this state- 
ment over carefully before you reject it. 

Many men have good principles without 
achieving much for their fellowmen. The 
habit of transforming conditions into better 
conditions is more comprehensively vital 
than any principle. Principles become 
vital powers only when we develop the 
habit of applying them to the problems of 
our lives. 

It is more vital to love right and do it 
than to know facts or commit catechisms 
to memory. 

Even many leaders have incorrect ideals 
in regard to the formation of habits. Hab- 
its do not become vital elements in char- 
acter, when the child acts under the domi- 
nant control of his parents or teachers. 
152 



Habits 153 

Most people think that if they compel 
a child to go in a certain path today, and on 
through the years of his childhood, they are 
forming in him the habit of following in 
that path always. They are really forming 
in his life the habit of submission without 
thought. That is the basis of slavery. 
Children whose habits are formed in this 
way have no vital habits. If they are weak 
types they may listlessly follow in the path 
laid out ; if they are strong when they leave 
home, or sooner, they break the bonds of 
such superficial habits, and being left with- 
out vital habits they often wreck their 
lives. 

It is a pathetic experience for a father 
who supposed he had given his son good 
habits to learn of the downfall of his boy; 
how helpless he appears as he tells his 
friends how carefully he trained his son, and 
thought he had made him form good habits. 

No one but the child himself can develop 
his habits. The motive that leads to the 
child's act mtist be his own, if repetition 
is to develop a vitally controlling habit. 



154 Adult and child 

Repetition of the same act is not the true 
basis of vital habit. Repetition of the use 
of the same fundamental principles in the 
achievement of our own visions in ac- 
cordance with our own plans, develops a 
really vital directive habit. 

The parent or teacher should have much 
to do with the development of the child's 
habits. He should kindle his nature and 
reveal ideals of trueness and pureness 
adapted to his stage of development, and 
not too high for him to take into his life as 
guiding principles. 

He should act as a comrade, lead him 
to despise what is mean, unclean, selfish 
and ungenerous, and to admire what is 
manly, frank, clean, and generous; and 
never fail to show real appreciation by 
word, or hand clasp, or smile, when he is 
forming habits by doing things he decides 
to do himself based on these principles. 

The one thing to be avoided is attempting 
to develop habits for the boy by compulsion 
or by external pressure of any kind. 

No man can form habits for another and 
engraft them on the other's life. 



Habits 155 

When we truly reverence the child's 
individuality we shall give up the old pro- 
cess of engrafting by compulsion, and learn 
that all soul growth must be from within 
out. 

When we study the child reverently and 
wisely we shall recognize him as a self -active 
soul with practically unlimited powers of 
growth from within, and not as a mere 
being whom we are to mould, whom we are 
to inoculate with certain elements of char- 
acter, whom we are to "sandpaper into a 
saint" by making him smooth on the out- 
side, and whom we are to coerce into paths 
of rectitude by corporal punishment, or 
by other coercive measures. 

"God neither ingrafts not inoculates. 
Development is from life through life to 
life."— Froebel. 

"Free obedience must take the place of 
blind obedience." — Froebel. 

"A free mind ought to learn nothing as 
a slave." — Plato. 

Most trainers of children try to plant 
habits in children's lives instead of sowing 



156 Adult and child 

the seeds of habits. Many sow seeds of 
habits without preparing the inner life 
soil of the child, and most of those who 
sow seeds of habits, think they have to 
make the seeds grow. If we keep the child 
in right conditions with plenty of oppor- 
tunity for work with sympathetic partner- 
ship with his parents, the boy will grow his 
own character habits. 



Chapter XXI 
Power and character 

Emerson said, "Personal force never 
goes out of fashion." Personal force of 
character is developed, when the child is 
kindled at the centre of his personal self- 
hood, or individual power; and when his 
emotional power is developed fully and 
controlled by true wisdom. 

No other way has been revealed by which 
a child may become conscious of his special 
power — and each child has some special 
power — except to let him be self-active by 
doing things he plans himself. 

You may make your child an aimless 
failure in life instead of a triumphant suc- 
cess by interfering with his freedom in 
working out his own plans, especially during 
his early years. 

Your child will grow to be relatively a 
failure, when considered with what he 
157 



158 Adult and child 

might have been unless he becomes con- 
scious of his real selfhood. 

The greatest thing a child's parents and 
teachers can do for him is to help him to 
become conscious of his greatest element 
of power. 

Most parents and teachers yet are con- 
tent to develop a child's power to study 
and memorize certain kinds of knowledge. 
These processes develop just two powers — 
memory and concentration, and both 
powers are developed in the weakest possi- 
ble way by ordinary school processes. 

Such concentration and memory de- 
velopment are storing processes only, and 
therefore cannot develop vital character, 
which is essentially propelling, productive, 
creative and achieving. 

Such work in the schools leaves the vital 
elements of human power and character 
unkindled and undeveloped, and life can 
never be so productive for the child him- 
self or for humanity as it should have been. 

Most parents and teachers yet test the 
success of a child's educational develop- 



Power and character 159 

ment by his brightness in book work. This 
is the most unreHable of all the tests. Few 
head boys become great leaders in dealing 
with the problems of life. 

Edward Everett Hale said that a distin- 
guished teacher told him that few parents 
had ever forgiven him if he said; "Your 
boy is thoroughly pure and good, but he 
is not quick or bright"; but if he said, 
"Your boy learns his lessons well; he is at 
the head of his class", nine out of ten parent 
were satisfied even if he added, "I wish I 
could say he was honest, pure and unself- 
ish." 

Cleverness in book knowledge is abso- 
lutely unreliable as a test of character, 
because to be clever in study does not call 
into action any of the fundamentally vital 
elements of power and character. 

A boy at an examination wrote, "A col- 
lege is a cemetery of learning." So long 
as schools and colleges direct attention to 
learning from books, mainly, and neglect 
the development of the child's productive 
character powers, this definition will entitle 



160 Adult and child 

the boy who wrote it to receive a good pass 
mark for his definition. 

President Eliot said, "The fruit of liberal 
education is not learning, but the capacity 
and desire to learn; not knowledge, but 
power." 

We should never forget that all children 
"desire to learn" in response to the leading 
of their natural wonder power, till they go 
to school, and are changed from problem 
finders to problem solvers. 

Aristotle wrote, "The intellect is per- 
fected not by knowledge, but by activity." 
This statement is more comprehensively 
vital than the statement of President . 
Eliot. 

Montaigne said, "To know by heart is 
not to know at all." 

Sir Joshua Fitch said, "Of all the exer- 
cises of the school there is none which has 
so little heart learning as learning by heart." 

Miss Blow said, "Knowledge is good, 
but creation is life." 

There are many things more vitally im- 
portant in the development of character 
than knowledge. Some day the work of 



Power and character 161 

the schools will be based on the child, and 
not on the studies to be learned; on the 
specified human powers regarded as vital, 
and not on preparation for the passing of 
prescribed examinations. 

Thring, the great English headmaster 
said; "Knowledge with its broken victuals, 
and its half-starved paupers snatching at 
the scraps, has lorded it long enough. It 
is high time to turn to better things, to 
liberty, to the free use of active powers.'" 

Never forget that all the old educational 
processes that are based, mainly, on the 
direct development of the child's memory- 
are ineffective even in the development 
of memory itself, and useless in the culti- 
vation of real individual executive power, 
if not destructive of it. 

Remember especially that all teaching 
is weak if not positively evil, that weakens 
the individual power of the child by the 
processes used in communicating knowledge 
to him. 

You are responsible if you let any school 
dwarf your boy, by keeping him at work 
on the lowest levels of his power instead 



162 Adult and child 

of guiding him to the free use of his highest 
powers to develop his mind most fully, to 
promote constructive productivity, creative 
activity, and vital achieving character. 
Never worry yourself, nor your child, 
because he does not keep near the head of 
his class in book knowledge. On the whole 
that may be a hopeful indication. 



Chapter XXII 
Good and had children 

Never call a child "bad". By doing so 
you define the ideal of badness instead of 
goodness in his mind. 

The man or woman who fixes in the na- 
ture of a child the idea that he is bad is an 
agent of evil. The ideal degrades the child 
even if the adult does not understand the 
serious results of the crime against the child. 

Train your child to do good, not merely 
to keep away from evil. A dodger of bad 
may be of no use to humanity or to God. 

Do not train your boy to be afraid of 
evil; train him to understand that he can 
overcome the wrong. 

Give him faith in right so that he may 
believe that evil is not strong, when men 
and women of real faith attack it. 

One of the most pathetic illustrations 
of human weakness is a man who says he 
believes in God, and yet dreads to face the 
powers of evil. 

163 



164 Adult and child 

If there is a boy in your neighborhood 
who in your opinion is not as good as you 
think he should be, do not be a social craven 
and refuse to let your boy associate with 
him. The comradeship of your son may 
sweeten the boy's life and help him to be 
a true man. 

It is remarkable how many good (not 
goody) men were called bad when they 
were young. 

It is wonderful how many ways a boy 
may be bad in the opinion of old fellows 
who act as if they had never been boys 
themselves. 

The wickedest men in a community are 
sometimes men who assume to be Christ's 
followers, and yet spend a good deal of 
time manufacturing new sins for boys to 
commit. 

Some preachers and some teachers yet 
tell children not to associate with those 
whom they call "bad". Try to improve 
them, and remind them of their predecessors 
who found fault with Christ because "He 
received sinners and even ate with them." 
If they will not improve, send your boy to 



Good and had children 165 

some other teacher, and try to get a better 
pastor. 

One of the clearest lessons taught by 
Christ was the value of social unity and the 
interdependence of the men and women 
and children of society. Do not risk your 
boy's future with a teacher who tries to rob 
the boy who probably more than any other 
boy in the neighborhood needs comrade- 
ship, of the right to social unity with his 
fellows. 

Help your child to become a doer of un- 
selfish things, not a mere dodger of evil 
— especially not a self-righteous dodger of 
his fellows. 

A mother came to a gentleman who was 
lecturing on educational subjects in her 
city and said; "I am the mother of the 
worst three-year-old child in this state. 
I was a teacher till I was married, and I 
know all about training children. I. cannot 
understand his case. I have never left him 
alone during the time he was awake, and 
I have never permitted him to play with 
another child. I have punished him and 
punished him, so it cannot be my fault 



166 Adult and child 

that he is bad. What would you advise 
me to do?" The heartless man replied; 
"If you are prepared to die, die. Your 
boy has no chance with you in control of 
his training. If you are not willing to die 
yet, get him an intelligent, jolly, young 
woman as comrade, and abdicate in her 
favor. Let her take him to a kinder- 
garten every day to see th.e children play 
and work. Tell her to get him the ma- 
terials he sees the other children using so 
that he may use them to make things that 
he likes to make. Ask her to invite other 
little children to play with him in your 
yard. When he is old enough let her take 
him and leave him in the kindergarten. 
You have stood between the child and God 
in almost every way possible. 

"You have robbed him of companionship 
and by doing that alone you have inter- 
fered with the growth of nearly every spirit- 
ual and communal element of his power, 

"By preventing the growth of his good 
elements of power, you have not destroyed 
them. You have done much worse than 
that — you have perverted them. All 



Good and had children 167 

the powers of evil you say he possesses 
were gifts of his Creator as powers for good 
to make him sweet, and pure, and un- 
selfish, and sociable, and spiritual, but his 
mother perverted them, and the identical 
elements intended to bless him and his 
fellowmen, you have used to degrade him. 

"A pure spring will make a pestilential 
marsh instead of a rippling stream if the 
freedom of its flow is prevented. You have 
stopped the free outflow of the greatest 
elements in your child's life, and turned 
blessings into blighting evils. 

"You say he destroys the toys you buy 
for him just to gratify his destructive ten- 
dencies. This should prove to you that 
he has great natural constructive power. 
The elements of power that were given to 
make children constructive and ultimately 
productive will, when unused or misused, 
make them destructive. 

"You strangled most of his good tenden- 
cies, as soon as he got out of his cradle. 
Unless you get them to work along natural 
lines 'their ghosts will return in after 
years in the form of grovelling sensuality.' " 



Chapter XXIII 
The right of choice 

One unused or misused element of power 
will weaken character. It may unbalance 
character. 

Will power without conscious power of 
choice may become mere stubborn wilful- 
ness. 

Begin very early to give j^our child the 
right of choosing his or her personal belong- 
ings. Take your little three-year-old girl 
with you when you are going to buy her a 
hair ribbon or a dress. Let her see several 
ribbons or dress patterns at the price you 
intend to pay, and let the child choose the 
color or pattern she likes best. You spend 
exactly the same amount as you would 
have spent by treating the child's taste 
with contempt and choosing the color or 
pattern you liked best, and you make the 
child genuinely happy. Better even than 
that, you make her conscious of choice- 
power, which is essential in developimg 

effective will power. 

168 



The right of choice 169 

Take your ten-year-old boy with you to 
a store. Tell the salesman the amount 
you can afford to pay for the boy's new suit. 
Get out several suits of different cut and 
color, and let the bo}' choose his own clothes. 
He has to wear them, not you. He will 
have a feeling much more developing to 
his better manhood, when he wears that 
suit, than he would have enjoyed if you had 
selected the same suit for him. 

Recognize in every department of your 
child's life his right of choice within the 
limit of directive law, or you miss three 
great opportunities for his true develop- 
ment; partnership with you, consciousness 
of the right of choice, and respect for di- 
rective law. 

The preservation of the harmony between 
liberty and law in your child's mind must 
be developed by experience and not by 
instruction, if it is to have vital influence 
in his moral force. 

You should not even choose the pro- 
fession or occupation your child is to follow 
through life. When he is old enough to 
think clearly, you should say, "I will not 



170 Adult and child 

decide for you. I will give you advice as 
fully as I can, when you begin to consider 
the matter ; and when you have chosen after 
consideration, I will be your partner in 
giving the best preparation I can afford 
for your work." 

Two questions are often asked of teachers 
"What shall I make of my boy?" and 
"What do you think my boy is best fitted 
for?" The first is adult presumption; 
the second is considerate wisdom. 

The modern movement for vocational 
guidance in schools is most important. 
Parents, teachers, and graduating children 
should most carefully consider the step 
that will have most vital influence in de- 
ciding the future life of the children. In 
the conference regarding the child's voca- 
tion, the child himself should be the central 
figure. Parents and teachers should be 
advisory comrades. 

Be sure that the decision in regard to the 
child's life work is not left to chance. 

Children should be trained early to under- 
stand the value of money, not for itself 



The right of choice 171 

but for the uses that may be made of it. 
Thrift is a fundamental virtue. 

Wastefulness, indifference in regard to 
saving small things of small value, rags, 
papers, old rubbers, old metal, etc. is one 
of the universal sins. 

When grandpa gives five cents to a child 
and says, "Go and buy yourself some candy, 
dear," he does so from kindness of heart, 
but he is really giving the child a training' 
in two character-destroying tendencies: 
wastefulness by spending money for what 
he does not need, and the gratification of 
appetite which may lay the foundation for 
degrading indulgence of appetite in later 
years. 

Even the food of children during their 
early years requires careful study by parents 
and physicians. It is quite possible to give 
a child debasing appetites by improper 
feeding before he is four years old. 

Every child should have a garden of his 
own where he may grow what he pleases, 
flowers or vegetables or both, not mainly 
for the profit there may be in his work. 



172 Adult and child 

but for the moral and spiritual uplift of 
partnership with God in producing beauty 
and value. 

All that a boy can save from the produce 
of his garden or from any other way of 
earning money, he should be trained to 
deposit in his school bank in order to de- 
velop the important habit of thrift. 



Chapter XXIV 
Spiritual vision 

Relate your child to Nature. AH child- 
ren love nature. Train your child to see 
the beauty of flowers and trees, of river 
and lake, of hill and dale. 

Let him find his own temple in the shady 
glen or under the hemlock on the hilltop. 

Let him enjoy the ecstasy of being alone 
in the open or in his chosen temple. He 
may have visions there that he could never 
get from books, or in the most beautiful 
temples ever built by man. 

He may not be conscious of his visions, 
but they will sink deep into his soul and 
in due time will become the centres of his 
spiritual vision and power. 

Do not try to fill your child's life with 
your adult spiritual visions. Spiritual 
dyspepsia is the most soul-destroying dis- 
ease known to humanity. 

Knowledge cramming is absurdly wicked, 
spiritual cramming is infinitely worse. 
173 



l74 Adult and child 

It is foolish to think that children can 
be trained to think by "letting other peo- 
ple's thoughts run through their heads"; 
it is more disastrously foolish to suppose 
that children's spiritual power can be de- 
veloped by letting other people's spiritual 
visions or ideals pass through their souls. 

Before a mental ideal can be understood 
we must have formed by experience ap- 
perceptive centres in oui minds related to 
the new ideal. It is more vitally true 
that before new spiritual vision can come 
to our souls, we must have ^ieveloped by 
experience apperceptive elements of cor- 
responding spiritual vision in our souls. 

The best way to prepare the soul of a 
child for spiritual insight and vitally un- 
folding spiritual vision, is to relate him to 
God through Nature in her growth pro- 
cesses from life to higher life, and through 
the wonders of the universe. 

The greatest things in the child's life are 
developed by his ccnsciousness of the unseen 
life in life and in life behind life. James 
Freeman Clarke wrote; "He who believes 
is strong; he who doubts is weak." No 



spiritual vision 175 

man can preach or teach in words vital 
faith in unseen power to a child so as to 
kindle him, but it is easy to relate even a 
little child to Nature and the universe 
so that a definite consciousness of the un- 
seen power behind them and through them 
may be revealed to him. 

The supreme purposes in training a child 
should be: — 

1. The revelation of his selfhood. 

2. The revelation of his responsibility 
for using for humanity the special power 
he possesses. This is the only vital basis 
on which his sense of duty rests. 

3. The consciousness that new power 
and new vision come to him only by using 
today the vision and power he has. 

4. The most vitally developing con- 
sciousness of all, that there is an unseen 
power which is the source of all power. 
He should ultimately know that this power 
is God. 

These four elements are the vital ele- 
ments of strong and triumphantly happy 
character. 



176 Adult and child 

Train your child to feel it in the fibre 
of his being that though he may fall, he 
cannot fail so long as he rises again and re- 
news the struggle towards the crest. 
Lowell says, "The greatest gift the hero 
leaves his race is to have been a hero." 

Have faith in the children. You can 
never help your child to go higher than 
your faith in him. 

If you have perfect faith in him, he will 
come to have perfect faith in you. 

Be your child's genuine comrade. You 
cannot pass any spurious chumship on him. 

Develop the power of living ivith your 
children, not merely for them. 

Try to remember your own viewpoint 
in childhood, so that you may develop the 
vital power of looking at the child and his 
world from his standpoint in dealing with 
him, and in estimating the value of his 
work. 

With your child be as fully as you can 
be in head and in heart a child. 

Patterson Du Bois said that of the thou- 
sands of questions written to him while he 
was editor of the Sunday School Times, 



spiritual vision 177 

about training children, only one was based 
on the child's viewpoint. 

A great teacher said: "When I was four 
years old I got a pencil and some paper 
and I made a picture. It meant a great 
deal to me. It was a visible representation 
of an ideal of my own. My joy was in- 
tense. I ran to share my joy with my 
mother. She was busy. She glanced at 
my picture but saw nothing but meaning- 
less lines though the vision in my soul 
was clear and inspiring to me. She merely 
said, 'If I could not draw better than that 
I would not draw at all.' My mother 
shut a gate between her soul and mine that 
day that was never re-opened." 

It is easy to shut gates between your soul 
and your child's soul. It is hard to re- 
open them. 

You may put a scar on your child's 
heart easily, without intending to do so, 
but you may not easily remove the scar. 

If you prick a tender leaf in the spring 
you will form a scar that will remain on the 
leaf till the autumn winds bear it away. 
It is a serious thing to scar a child's heart. 



178 Adult and child 

To the sensitively considerate heart 
of an adult — parent or teacher — there can 
be no memory more full of poignant regret 
than the memory of a child's face on which 
we put a dark shadow, or a tear that ran 
from a tender heart wounded by lack of 
sympathy and considerate response on our 
part. 

To keep our lives in tune with our 
children it will help to remember the re- 
morse of the father who wrote: 

'Twas the dear little girl that I scolded — 

For, "Was it a moment like this," 
I said, "when she knew I was busy, 

To come romping in for a kiss? 
Come rowdying up from her mother 

And clamoring there at my knee 
For 'one 'ittle kiss for my dolly. 

And one 'ittle uzzer for me'?" 
God pity the heart that repelled her 

And the cold hand that turned her away! 
And take from the lips that denied her 

This answerless prayer of today! 
Take, Lord, from my memory forever 

That pitiful sob of despair. 



spiritual vision 179 

And the patter and trip of the Httle bare 
feet, 
And the one piercing cry on the stair! 

Solomon said; "Train up a child in the 
way he should go, and when he is old he 
will not depart from it. Remember that 
"HE" and "GO" are the most important 
words in Solomon's advice. Remember, 
too, that the word translated "train" in 
Solomon's advice is used only three times 
in the Bible and that it means clearing 
away difficulties that prevent vital action. 



Chapter XXV 
A vital educational creed 

I believe: 

That God is the Creator, the source of 
Hfe, the essence of life which gives it the 
power of evolution to higher life, and the 
centre of universal unity. 

That God and the child are the essential 
elements in all true educational thought 
and investigation. 

That man's highest destiny is unity or 
inner connection with God. 

That the perfect community of humanity 
is the only sure foundation for the complete 
unity of humanity with God. 

That the fullest development of the 
individual is the true basis for the perfect 
community or inter-relationship of hu- 
manity. Race-inclusive individuals form 
an individual race. 

That the highest function of education 
is to aid in the complete development of 
individuality as the true basis for the com- 
180 



A vital educational creed 181 

munity of humanity and the unity of hu- 
manity with God. 

That the self-good of the child is the 
element of divinity in it. 

That no one can be a true teacher, until 
his reverence for the sacredness of individu- 
ality or self-hood is strong enough to pre- 
vent his interference with its perfect de- 
velopment. 

That self -activity — the activity of self- 
hood — is the only possible process by which 
self -hood or individuality can be developed. 

That activity in response ro the direct 
suggestion or command of another is in 
no sense true self-activity. 

That every individual should be self- 
propulsive and self -directing; positive, 
not negative. 

That children who, during their school 
and college cources, study and act only in 
response to suggestions or instructions from 
their teachers, are being trained to be obe- 
dient followers merely, who may possibly 
act well under direction, but whose only 
positiveness of character results from their 



182 Adult and child 

incidental training outside the school and 
college. 

That even responsive activity is infinitely 
better than receptive passivity on the part 
of the pupil; but the only true developing 
■activity is that in which the child's ex- 
ecutive work results from its own origina- 
tive and directive powers. 

That self-expression is the only ideal of 
expression worthy of recognition by edu- 
cators. All lower ideals of expression, 
orally, or in writing, or by drawing, mod- 
eling, painting, or in any other way, are 
destructive of power. Expression should 
be the highest agency for developing power 
instead of destroying it. 

That the best test of efficiency of an edu- 
cational method is the amount of true 
self -activity it requires of the child in the 
originative, directive, and executive de- 
partments of its power. 

That there are evolutionary stages, or 
culture epochs, in the complete develop- 
ment of individual power and character. 

That complete development in maturity 
is impossible, unless there has been complete 



A vital educatiofial creed 183 

appropriate development in each of the 
preceding stages of evolution. 

That development is always arrested, 
when work adapted to a higher evolution- 
ary stage is forced prematurely upon the 
attention of a child. 

That it is a grievous wrong to give a 
child more knowledge or more power to 
acquire knowledge, without at the same 
time, and, as far as possible by the same 
process, increasing its power and tendency 
to use knowledge. 

That the educational methods of the 
past have developed the sensor at the ex- 
pense of the motor system, and that there- 
fore men have become more receptive 
than executive. Educational methods 
should develop the motor system and es- 
tablish the necessary reactions between 
the sensor and motor systems. 

That the power of problem discovery 
is the greatest intellectual power. The 
schools dwarf pupils by making them 
problem solvers only. Before children go 
to school they are problem discoverers as 
well as problem solvers. 



184 Adult and child 

That the natural wonder-power and the 
power of problem discovery would in- 
crease throughout a man's whole life, if 
their development were not arrested by 
unwise methods in schools. 

That wonder-power and problem-dis- 
covery, are the essential elements in alert 
and aggressive interest. 

That alert, aggressive, persistent, and 
self-active interest is the true stimulus to 
productive intellectual effort. 

That the child's attention should be self- 
active. Teachers have no right to control 
attention. Interest and attention act spon- 
taneously if the proper conditions of in- 
terest are provided. 

That it is always wrong to substitute 
the teacher's interests for the child's in- 
terests. The teacher's duty is to provide 
conditions of interest adapted to the evo- 
lutionary stage of the child. 

That one of the most important duties 
of educators is to form by experience in 
the child's mind in the earliest stage of 
its development, as wide a range as possi- 
ble of apperceptive centers of feeling, that 



A vital educational creed 185 

thoughts communicated during the period 
of conscious development may have vi- 
tality and meaning. The outer can never 
be made clear, unless there is in the inner 
at least a germ to which the outer may be 
related. 

That new knowledge becomes a part of 
our permanent mental equipment and an 
element in character only when the corres- 
ponding inner feeling and knowledge are 
aroused sufficiently to lead to a perfect 
union between the old and new. The 
increase of knowledge should be by amal- . 
gamation, not by mere accumulation. 

That the activity of the self-hood of the 
child is the only certain way of making 
the mind actively and aggressively apper- 
ceptive; the only way by which interest 
can become persistently investigative and 
truly stimulative. 

That the child's centre of interest is the 
true guide in the correlation or concentra- 
tion of studies. 

That Nature is the most attractive, the 
most suggestive, the most enlightening 



186 Adult and child 

and the most productive correlating centre 
for childhood. 

That the history of man's achievements, 
the revelation of the best ideals of civiliza- 
tion, and the co-ordination of the uplifting 
forces of society are the central rivers to 
which all educational streams should be 
tributary above the primary school, includ- 
ing the work in colleges and universities. 

That the physical, intellectual, and 
spiritual natures should be trained as a 
unity, and that the weakest department of 
power should receive most careful culture. 

That informal training is more pro- 
ductive than formal training in all depart- 
ments of human power. 

That children love productive work 
better than idleness. They may not like 
the work we choose for them. It would 
indicate deterioration if they did. They 
like more developing work than ours, if 
we have wisdom sufficient to place them 
in conditions of proper independent choice. 
The power to choose wisely, to decide 
correctly, and to control one's own powers 
in achieving good purposes, is even more 



A vital educational creed 187 

important than the power of accomplish- 
ment, which becomes merely mechanical 
if divorced from originality of conception. 

That it is not necessary to destroy a 
child's power in order to change its direc- 
tion. Most of what has been called disci- 
pline in schools has crippled in order to 
control. 

That coercion is always destructive of 
character power. 

That while human tendency is not always 
towards the Divine, human power is al- 
ways divine. 

That if the child's power is used in crea- 
tive self-activity for right purposes, it will 
lift the child progressively towards the 
Divine. 



iii 






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